Drive Jefferson Highway between the Huey P. Long Bridge and the Elmwood shopping district and you've passed the fence line without necessarily clocking what's behind it. Eighty-eight acres of oak-shaded fairway, laid out along a bend of the Mississippi in the 1920s, sitting quiet since 2012. Most of it still looks the way it looked when golfers were playing it: mowed rough giving way to stands of live oak, open sky where a clubhouse used to stand.
That quiet has outlasted three different development pitches, a resident petition drive, a mayor's negotiated compromise, and the only construction project that's actually broken ground there in over a decade. If you live in Harahan, River Ridge, or Old Jefferson and have wondered what happened to "the old golf course," the honest answer is: less than almost anyone expected, in either direction.
What Closed, and Why the Silence Lasted So Long
Colonial Golf & Country Club opened along the river side of Jefferson Highway in the 1920s and ran eighteen holes for nearly ninety years before it shut down in 2012. Developers John Georges and Wayne Ducote bought the site the same year it closed. For a long stretch after that, nothing visible happened. The land just sat, and neighbors on Halsey, McArthur, Nimitz, Marshall, Wainright, Erin, and Colonial Club Drive got used to having an unofficial park behind their houses.
That silence ended in 2013, when a packed community meeting made clear that whatever came next would be contested, not welcomed.
The Fight Was Never About the Land Sitting Empty
Nobody organized to keep the golf course itself. The fight was about what would replace it. Opponents drafted a formal petition against a proposed commercial and retail buildout, and it's specific in a way that generic coverage never is. It named the exact streets that would absorb new traffic. It counted the city's existing vacant commercial inventory at more than 30 properties and pointed out that the local Popeye's had just shuttered. It noted that Harahan already had three grocery options within 2.2 miles: Breaux Mart at 1.7 miles, Winn-Dixie at 0.6 miles, and Walmart at 2.2 miles, meaning a new grocery anchor on the golf course site wouldn't be filling a gap so much as splitting an existing customer base.
One resident, Marc Dietzway, laid out the preferred alternative to a local news crew at the time:
"I'd rather it go back to what it used to be, either a private golf course or another green space."
More green space, or nothing at all, ran through most of the opposition. It's also, as the record shows, close to what has actually happened.
The Deal Mayor Miceli Actually Signed
By February 2018, Harahan Mayor Tina Miceli had negotiated a framework with Georges and Ducote that split the difference rather than picking a side. Under that agreement, the property's roughly 88 acres broke down like this:
| Acreage | Planned use |
|---|---|
| 15 acres | Commercial development along Jefferson Highway |
| 15 acres | Retention pond, addressing drainage concerns |
| 58 acres | Residential, roughly 76 new homes |
Miceli's leverage was a veto over the commercial tract, and she used it as a bargaining chip rather than a blocking move. Her condition was that any commercial approval had to include new residential development as a buffer between retail and existing homes. As she put it at the time, the goal was "to put this land back into commerce while protecting the sanctity of our peaceful city and the integrity of our neighborhoods."
By 2021, the development team, still anchored by Wayne Ducote and now working alongside fellow developer Danny McKearan, had revised those numbers again: a 40-acre residential parcel closer to the river, 15 acres of commercial along the highway, and a new access road built specifically to route construction traffic away from Colonial Club Drive instead of through it. The commercial footprint held steady across both versions of the plan. The residential math kept moving.
What Actually Got Built
Here's where the story departs from both the developers' pitch and the petition's fears. The only completed project on the 88 acres to date is The Blake at Colonial Club, a $28 million assisted living and memory care community that opened in 2021 after several years of construction. It's a 115,000-square-foot building with 70 assisted living apartments and 48 memory care units, owned by Quality Senior Living, a Pensacola-based operator backed by New Orleans private equity firm LongueVue Capital.
The Blake's co-founder, Glenn Barclay, described the project at its opening as an effort to "take care of the details, so our residents can enjoy the finer things in life." Marketing language aside, the practical fact is that one self-contained facility now occupies a corner of the old course. Not a shopping center. Not 76 new houses. One senior living building, on what appears to be a fraction of the 15 commercial acres set aside in the 2018 deal.
Why the Rest Still Reads as a Golf Course
This is the part that a quick drive-by or an old news clip won't tell you. The residential phase, the 58 acres and roughly 76 homes that were supposed to be the biggest single change to the property, doesn't show up as completed anywhere in the public record. Home listings on Colonial Club Drive today still describe backyard views looking out over what they call "the Greenspace," with a note that it's the former Colonial Golf & Country Club. That's not developer branding. That's how current owners on that street are choosing to describe what's still sitting behind their fences, years after the compromise was signed and years after The Blake opened its doors.
Small-city development tends to move this way. A mayor with real veto power negotiates a framework that satisfies enough of both sides to get signed. The most contained, least controversial piece, in this case a single commercial parcel along Jefferson Highway, gets built first, because it's the smallest ask and the least likely to reopen fights about traffic and drainage. The larger residential build-out, the part that would actually change the character of Colonial Club Drive and put dozens of new roofs where fairways used to be, moves slower, gets renegotiated, or simply hasn't happened yet.
Here's what that looks like set side by side:
- What was proposed in 2018: 15 acres commercial, 15 acres retention pond, 58 acres and roughly 76 new homes
- What was proposed again in 2021: 40 acres residential near the river, 15 acres commercial along the highway, a new access road
- What exists today: one assisted living and memory care community, and a large stretch of land current residents still call green space
What This Means If You're Already Here
If you live along Jefferson Highway between Harahan and River Ridge, the practical takeaway isn't that change is coming, or that it isn't. It's that the specific change most people assumed, either total commercial sprawl or a subdivision full of new construction, hasn't landed the way either side expected. What's actually there right now is one senior living campus and a lot of open, oak-shaded acreage that neighbors are still calling green space rather than a construction zone.
If the residential phase comes back before Harahan's City Council, the agendas are public record and worth a periodic check if you live anywhere near Colonial Club Drive. For now, the honest status of the old golf course reads less like a finish line and more like a long pause that's already outlasted two development plans.
Stories like this one, where the paper trail matters more than the headline, are exactly what shapes what a home near a stalled or slow-moving project is actually worth. If you're weighing a move in Harahan, River Ridge, or Old Jefferson, or you want a clear-eyed read on where your own property sits relative to sites like this, The Martzolf Group can walk you through it. Request Your Home Valuation and get a straight answer, not a guess.
