Has May Street reopened yet?
If you walk, run, or bike around the lakes near LSU, you've probably asked yourself that question more than once this year, usually while detouring up Stanford Avenue or cutting through City-Brooks Community Park on Dalrymple Drive because the direct route across the water has been fenced off since June 2025. And if you've also caught wind of the fight over the nine-hole golf course at City-Brooks, you might assume it's all one project moving toward one finish line. It isn't. The bridge and the golf course are running on two separate clocks, decided by two separate organizations, and conflating them is the easiest way to end up either disappointed or pleasantly surprised for the wrong reasons.
Two projects, not one
The first is the University Lakes Restoration Project, the effort that's had cranes and dredging equipment parked in University Lake and City Park Lake since 2023. It's led by the consulting firm CSRS, with project lead Mark Goodson doing most of the public updates, and it's funded through roughly $100 million raised by community partners led by the LSU Foundation. Its job is ecological and structural: deepen the six lakes, which had shrunk to an average depth of about two and a half feet before the drought of 2023 made things worse, and connect City Park Lake to University Lake with a new channel and bridge where May Street used to run straight through.
The second is BREC's City-Brooks Park & Lakes Vision Plan, a separate planning process examining what the park itself should become. BREC brought in the design firm Sasaki Associates to run community meetings, collect survey responses, and draft concepts for the park's future. This is the process that produced the now-familiar "Big Loop" and "Stitch" proposals, and it's the one deciding what happens to the 1926 golf course. It has its own funding question (BREC estimates put the full six-phase build between $75 million and $125 million, with completion stretching over more than a decade) and its own timeline, one that hasn't reached a final vote yet.
Both projects touch the same six lakes and the same stretch of green space between LSU and Government Street. Neither one controls the other's calendar.
Where the bridge actually stands
May Street has been closed to cars, cyclists, and pedestrians since June 4, 2025. The original target for reopening was the middle of 2026, then late August 2026. By March of this year, Goodson was telling reporters the timeline had slipped again because of geotechnical problems with the bridge approaches, soft soil that needed more work than planned. His revised target was "the end of the year," though he was careful to call that a hope rather than a guarantee. Crews began pile driving for the new bridge in June, with work expected to continue through the rest of summer, and dredging across the lake system is now targeted to wrap by the end of 2026. Nothing in the public record since then points to an early finish, so if you're still detouring up Stanford or through the park on Dalrymple, plan on that lasting into the fall, possibly longer.
The payoff, when it arrives, is a real upgrade for anyone who uses the lakes on foot or by bike. The new two-lane bridge will carry 14-foot multiuse paths on both sides, separated from car traffic by a barrier wall, something the old three-way intersection at Dalrymple and East Lakeshore never had. The channel underneath will have five and a half feet of clearance, enough for kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards to pass between University Lake and City Park Lake for the first time since the lakes were built. If you've ever wanted to paddle the full loop instead of just walking it, that's the project that makes it possible.
In the meantime, expect the closure to matter most on LSU home game Saturdays, when traffic that used to flow through May Street backs up onto Stanford and Dalrymple instead.
The golf course was never as settled as the headlines made it sound
City-Brooks' nine-hole course dates to 1926, was designed by golf architect Tom Bendelow, and is one of only 20 courses in the country listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It sits on about 40 of the park's roughly 150 acres. Early design concepts from Sasaki, the "Big Loop" and "The Stitch," both trimmed the course's footprint to make room for expanded trails, a running track, or bike lanes. That framing, more trails or more golf, is what most residents have heard about all year, and it's the version that packed a community meeting on July 14.
It's also not quite what happened. On August 10, 2026, BREC presented a preferred plan that keeps all nine holes and holds the par at 32, while reducing total yardage from 2,300 to about 2,080. BREC Commissioner Mike Polito called it remarkable that the design team managed to preserve the course's distance and par at the same time as other changes. State Rep. Dixon McMakin, who's been pushing his own compromise proposal that leaves the course largely untouched, says he's still not satisfied. BREC Superintendent Brooks Williams put the tension plainly at the meeting: "You can't make everybody happy all the time, but you have to listen to people and take into account what it is they want to see and don't want to see."
The part of this story that's easy to miss is why the course mattered enough to fight over. It isn't a money-losing relic being kept alive out of nostalgia. Golf usage at City-Brooks has climbed since the pandemic, and earlier this year BREC leadership reported the course's revenue exceeded its operating expenses by roughly 10 percent, a rare thing for a municipal nine-hole course. That's the detail that explains why cutting it looked simple on a rendering and turned out to be politically difficult in practice.
Here's where the two projects stand, side by side, as of late August 2026:
| Project | Who's running it | Status right now | What happens next |
|---|---|---|---|
| University Lakes Restoration (the bridge) | CSRS, funded by LSU Foundation-led partners | Bridge construction and dredging underway; May Street still closed | Reopening targeted for end of 2026, not guaranteed |
| City-Brooks Park & Lakes Vision Plan (the golf course and trails) | BREC, with Sasaki Associates | Compromise plan presented August 10, no final vote yet | Public meeting September 17; BREC Commission vote expected in fall, not before October |
If you want a say before it's final
BREC has not made a final decision on the City-Brooks master plan. The next public meeting is scheduled for September 17, 2026, and the BREC Commission vote is expected sometime this fall, with officials saying it won't happen before October. If you have an opinion about the golf course, the pathway mileage, or anything else in the plan, that meeting is the place to say so before the design is locked in. Updates and survey information are posted at brec.org/lakesvision, and the lake restoration project posts its own construction updates at universitylakesproject.org.
For everyone else, the practical takeaway is simpler. The bridge that will eventually make the whole lake loop walkable and paddle-able in one continuous path is still under construction, with a soft target of late 2026. The park plan that will decide the golf course's final shape hasn't been voted on yet. Both are worth watching, but they'll resolve on their own schedules, and neither one's finish line tells you anything about the other's.
If you're one of the households who ended up loving this stretch of Baton Rouge because of the lakes, the dog park, or a Saturday round at City-Brooks, and you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth once both projects settle, Jodie B. Strain has spent two decades watching how public investment like this plays out in the neighborhoods around it. Let's Connect.
