It runs southwest from the head of Bayou St. John (near where it once joined to the Carondelet Canal, now the Lafitte Greenway) in the Mid-City neighborhood to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in the Gert Town neighborhood.
Like most streets in New Orleans, the segment of the parkway to the north east of Canal Street is named "North" Norman C. Francis Parkway while the segment to the southwest is denoted as "South".
The parkway is wide with a grassy median except for where it crosses over the Pontchartrain Expressway.
Part of the parkway was to be laid on Hagan Avenue which was named for John Hagan, a New Orleans merchant and land speculator who was in a real estate partnership with the Marquis de Lafayette.
[2] In 1910, a 20-block portion of Hagan Avenue was renamed for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America who died in New Orleans in 1889.