The Rise and Fall of Six Flags New Orleans: Killed By Katrina

The cheap, low, publicly owned ground that let New Orleans build its first big theme park in a generation is the same ground that drowned it. In 2000 Jazzland opened in New Orleans East as a love letter to the city itself, a park of Mardi Gras, Cajun Country and a wooden coaster named for the old Zephyr at Pontchartrain Beach, built on a concrete deck over drained swamp with federal loans and a state bond. Two seasons and one bankruptcy later, Six Flags took it over and rebranded it, until Hurricane Katrina left it under brackish floodwater for about a month in 2005. What followed was a total loss, a bankruptcy settlement, twenty years of rescue plans, a second life as a Hollywood backlot, and at last the demolition crews. In this episode: How the closing of Pontchartrain Beach in 1983 left New Orleans without a big amusement park for seventeen years Why a state bond required the Jazzland land to be owned by the public, and what that cost the city The sale of the park to a Greek company one day before it opened The brutal second summer, the 2002 bankruptcy, and the federal audit that followed Six Flags, Batman The Ride, and the spring of 2003 Katrina, the levee failures, and the month the park spent under water The lease fight with Mayor Ray Nagin and the 2009 bankruptcy settlement Jurassic World, Deepwater Horizon and the strange afterlife of an abandoned parking lot Subscribe to Lost Vacationland for more stories of the parks, resorts and beaches America built for its summers and then left to the weather. #SixFlagsNewOrleans #LostVacationland #RiseAndFall #Jazzland #HurricaneKatrina #NewOrleans #NewOrleansEast #AbandonedThemePark #MegaZeph #AmericanHistory