Six Flags New Orleans
Updated February 8, 2023 | By Matthew Christopher
It’s hard to believe Six Flags New Orleans was ever anything but abandoned. The brief span of its active life, from its opening date on May 20, 2000 to its impromptu and unexpected closure on August 21, 2005, is eclipsed by the 17 years it has spent vacant since. Now, with roller coasters wreathed in Smilax thorns and the ever-present threat of alligators lurking in the underbrush, it feels more like a fictionalized version of an amusement park – perhaps the hideout for a villain, or the setting for a nightmare. It seems inconceivable that an entire 220-acre amusement park would be left to fade back into a swampy jungle like some forgotten Aztec ruin, and yet it simultaneously feels inevitable: Six Flags New Orleans has the atmosphere of something that materialized in our world solely to serve as a shadowy reflection of the commercialization of fun. It peers at us through the thicket, with the steel spines of its roller coasters arching above the trees like the fossils of gargantuan serpents, challenging us to confront the reality that in less than a month a symbol of prosperity, hope, and optimism can transform into a grim reminder of a tragedy that ended nearly 1,400 lives.
It wasn’t always like this. Once it was a different kind of dream, and that dream was that New Orleans would have its own theme park centered around the region’s rich history. After the closure of the Ponchartrain Beach theme park, which had opened in 1928 and went under in 1983 due to falling attendance, the closest amusement park to New Orleans was Astroworld in Houston, which was roughly 350 miles away. Real estate developers Tom and Dian Winingder owned a swampy 220-acre pot of land that had been in Dian’s family for 50 years (and supposedly had been considered as a site for Disney World) and envisioned it as the site of a park that would be named Jazzland, which would have unique areas dedicated to Mardi Gras, Ponchartrain Beach, the French Quarter, and Cajun Country. There would of course be plenty of music throughout.
A view of Six Flags New Orleans Main Street section shows the toll vandalism has taken on the park. Click and drag on the image to look around.
The concept took nearly a decade to realize, and was imperiled so many times by various investors (including Six Flags) showing interest and then bailing that it was labeled “the project that would never be”. In 1997, South Carolina developer Burroughs & Chapin backed out, but through a combination of city, state, and federal incentives, and the investment of aviation and energy giant Ogden Corp.’s entertainment subsidiary, ground was finally broken for the project. Among the 25 initial rides was the MegaZeph, a recreation of Ponchartrain Beach’s wooden Zephyr roller coaster. The entire park was built on a four-foot raised platform, to keep it above the swamps and compensate for the fact that New Orleans itself is below sea level. Before the park had even let in the first guests, ownership changed: Ogden’s theme park division was sold for $148 million to Greek conglomerate Alfa Alfa Holdings and renamed Alfa SmartParks Inc. a mere two months before Jazzland opened in May 2000.
Jazzland’s opening day was not short on fanfare: Air Force jets flew overhead and 700 to 800 carrier pigeons were released, ten of which carried news of the park’s opening to other states. Jazzland’s first season was well-attended, with an estimated 1.1 million visitors, but that number dropped in half the next year. The lack of a waterpark, which was planned for the future, was a deterrent in the blisteringly hot New Orleans summers, as was the lack of canopies and shaded areas for guests. Standing in line for rides beneath the blazing midday sun without relief from the heat was simply not an attractive proposition for families. Alfa Smartparks was in over their heads: more accustomed to managing water parks and smaller attractions, they had also assumed $80 million in debt as a result of their purchase from Ogden. Citing the economic benefit of keeping the park open, the HUD loaned $25.3 million to Alfa, which promptly went bankrupt in 2002 and left the city on the hook for repaying the loan. The lease was shopped around to potential new operators and was sold to Six Flags for $22 million with an attached 75-year lease. Six Flags spent $20 million upgrading the park and reopened it in 2003 as Six Flags New Orleans. Canopies and shaded areas were installed and new rides featuring Warner Brothers characters were added to the park as well: there was a new Batman roller coaster and other DC Comics-inspired rides, and the children’s rides were adorned with Looney Tunes mascots.
The Joker's Jukebox, where the one ride-related fatality in the park occurred
It was during the 2003 season that the only fatal injury from a ride I’ve uncovered occurred, at the already disturbing Joker’s Jukebox ride. Rosa Donaldson, a 52-year old grandmother, entered the ride area to check her 4-year-old grandson’s safety belt. The ride, which consists of metal cars plastered with the Joker’s psychotic grin that spin around larger steel arms that in turn spin around a center column, was 3 feet off the ground when Donaldson entered. Ride operators were apparently unaware she was in the gated area as they started the ride. Donaldson was struck in the head and again in the pelvis by the cars, which must have been an unspeakably horrific event to witness for everyone present and an awful trauma for Donaldson’s family. She died from internal injuries related to a crushed pelvis at Lakeland Medical Center, and while the accident was reportedly investigated by the police, the state Fire Marshall’s office, and Six Flags itself, no further details about it are available. While we may never know the full story, if Ms. Donaldson noticed that her grandson wasn't properly secured as the ride was starting and couldn't get the attention of the ride operators, she may have had only seconds to make a decision to keep him from being thrown from the car and potentially killed. It's quite possible if she did get him secured before she was struck that she saved his life at the cost of her own in a heroic act that many grandparents and parents would surely understand. Having spent a fair amount of time photographing the Joker’s Jukebox after the park was abandoned but without any knowledge at the time of the incident, I found the ride design unsettling and malevolent. The idea that at least two of the cars, fashioned as an homage to a gleeful murderer no less, brutally ended someone’s life and that people continued to unknowingly ride in them day after day afterwards is deeply unsettling to say the least.
Even at the time of Six Flags New Orleans’ grand reopening, Six Flags itself was in financial trouble. They had been acquired by Premier Parks in 1998, which purchased 31 parks in four years but hadn’t managed to eke out a profit from them and instead lost $122 million in the first half of 2003 alone. In 2005 the AstroWorld park in Houston was closed and demolished, despite performing relatively well, and Six Flags was looking to sell other parks. It is probable that Six Flags New Orleans, which was one of Six Flags’ least profitable parks, would have been sold or possibly closed despite the fact that a waterpark addition was reportedly in the planning stages and was expected to be announced late in the 2005 season.
Six Flags New Orleans’ last day of operation was Sunday, August 21, 2005, and it would only have been open weekends for the rest of the season. The tropical depression that would become Hurricane Katrina formed on August 23, and by August 25 it had strengthened into a hurricane shortly after hitting the Florida coast. Six Flags New Orleans cancelled its operations on August 27 and 28 in anticipation of Katrina, posting the now infamous “CLOSED FOR STORM” sign at the front entrance. The suddenness and ferocity of the Category 5 hurricane left little time to prepare the park to weather it, however. As the levees that were intended to protect New Orleans from flooding failed, water poured into the city, causing over $100 billion worth of damage . Twenty percent of the city was underwater in what was, at the time, the most expensive natural disaster that had ever occurred in the United States.
The Zydeco Screamer roller coaster's seating area. Click and drag on the image to look around.
Though Six Flags New Orleans did have drainage pumps in place, there was no way they could keep up with the torrent of water entering the park from Lake Ponchartrain, and they quickly failed. The park was submerged in up to seven feet of brackish salt water for over a month. Initial damage estimates reported eighty percent of the rides and support structures were unsalvageable. After the waters receded mold flourished in the humid buildings, the wood and steel support structure for the MegaZeph would need rebuilt, and all of the food and merchandise in the park were ruined. One of the only major rides to be reused was Batman: The Ride, which sat on an elevated platform. In 2006 Six Flags stated it had no intent to rebuild, declared the park a total loss, and began negotiations to terminate their 75-year lease.
Six Flags attempted to recover $150 million from the park’s insurers but failed because many of the policies specifically excluded flood damage. The company was in dire straits for reasons that had nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina. The sale of the AstroWorld property made half of what Six Flags had expected. From August to November of 2005 the company’s investors waged a successful proxy war to take control of Six Flags’ board of directors. In April 2009 Six Flags’ stock was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and shortly after that the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. A settlement deal with New Orleans was finally brokered in which Six Flags would pay the city $3 million and 25% of any insurance recovered above $65 million, all litigation would be dropped, and the lease would be terminated. It was reported that it would cost $1 million to demolish the park, but that seems like a ridiculously low estimate to me.
In the more than a decade since the city took ownership, an unending parade of plans for redevelopment have been proposed and subsequently fallen through. Louisiana-based developer Southern Star Amusement floated three proposals for reopening the property between 2008 and 2011 which included a Nickelodeon Universe water and theme park which fizzled out when Nickelodeon ended their licensing agreement in 2009 after Southern Star was unable to acquire $100 million in business development bonds. In addition to reusing the property as a theme/water park, Southern Star also proposed a hotel, a sports complex, and a movie studio. After Southern Star failed to start the process of taking possession of, cleaning, and funding the property in 2011, the City of New Orleans decided to move on and accept other proposals. Southern Star Amusements seems to have dissolved since then.
Ideas for repurposing the property included reopening Jazzland, or building a power plant or an outlet mall. Though the Jazzland Outlet Mall was initially selected by the city, the developers pulled out in 2013 citing competition from an outlet mall expansion to the Riverwalk Marketplace about 30 minutes from the Six Flags New Orleans property. There was an attempt to rebuild the park as Dreamlanding Festival Park in 2016-2018 which evaporated when an inspection revealed how deteriorated the rides and buildings on the property had become. The Jazzland Paidia Company had also attempted to reopen Jazzland between 2011 and 2021, and despite submitting offers for the property and the only proposal for redevelopment in 2014, their plans were largely ignored by the Mayor’s office. Finally, the Bayou Phoenix company won its 2021 bid to redevelop the site into a water park, hotel, sports complex, and recreation area, but as of November 2022 the deal had not been complete and was described as being “on life support”. In January 2023 the parties were cautiously optimistic that a deal had been reached, but the transfer still has not occurred.
The Ponchartrain Beach area of the park featured the arcade, the Ferris wheel, and carnival games.
Throughout the years, articles have breathlessly proclaimed that Six Flags New Orleans was finally about to be torn down, yet as of this writing it still stands. The property has seen some use as a movie set for films that include Killer Joe, Deepwater Horizon, Jurassic World, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, Reminiscence, Stolen, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Many of these films used only the parking lot as a construction site for their sets, most notably Deepwater Horizon’s enormous water tank and oil rig which boasted a helipad large enough to land a Chinook helicopter on. When the scenes of the oil rig exploding in flames were shot, the city reassured residents that the park was not on fire, they were just filming a movie. Reminiscence and Percy Jackson did feature recognizable landmarks from the parks in the final films.
Beyond that, the park is mostly now a home for wildlife. Boars, snakes, alligators, and wasps are among the hazards awaiting trespassers, and the security and police are aggressive about keeping sightseers off the property as well. There are at least two instances I’m aware of where security guards pulled guns on people entering the park to take photos or video. It is not a welcoming site for visitors, and yet many people still go despite the risks. The park’s presence has destroyed property values in nearby neighborhoods, and the dark silhouettes of the roller coasters are readily visible along New Orleans’ heavily traveled corridor of Interstate 510, a physical manifestation of the scars from Katrina that still have not healed nearly two decades later.
After ten years of trying, I was fortunate enough to secure permission from the city to photograph the property in 2016. I suppose what I saw was what I expected, even though it still was hard to comprehend. The omnipresent water lines along nearly every structure in the park were a chilling indicator of the month it had spent underwater. One of my first jobs was working in an amusement park and I spent a fair amount of time in the one that was near where I grew up. Though the motifs and color palettes were different, Six Flags New Orleans felt like a place I had been before, or perhaps somewhere that had always been a part of me. Just as I can never go back to that period of my youth, there is no chance Jazzland can ever go back to what it was. The brief burst of activity and exuberance in the park’s opening is now relegated to that haunted realm of fading memories. We can look through the hazy filter of fond recollection at Jazzland’s glory days like a middle-aged drunk regaling bar patrons with stories of his high school football victories, but that short-lived flame has long since burned out. Whereas Six Flags New Orleans was once filled with music and the screams of children riding roller coasters, it has been silent so long that those children likely have children of their own.
The overgrown children's rides section in Six Flags
What do you do with that passage of time, with things that you were once so hopeful about that for whatever reason were spectacularly destroyed by malicious fate? How do you process it? As a society, we tear those aching reminders down and build something else on that spot. Sooner or later that’s what will happen to Six Flags New Orleans. It seems as though it would still be a risky place for construction, and one has to wonder if the declining population of New Orleans could ever truly support another theme park built on the site. A selfish part of me wishes that the park would remain there long after humanity has imploded as a testament to who we were in this precarious era – chasing thrills and profit while desperately oblivious to the waters rising up to swallow us. In that sense it’s a better analogy for this time period than anything I could ever dream up, and I think maybe that’s why we are drawn to it. Having cast aside the cloak of catering to the masses, Jazzland has revealed its true self as an ominous reflection of things to come. It serves as a black mirror in which we see ourselves not in terms of who we wish to be but who we in fact are. Such things, for the moment, must be destroyed. They hurt too much to look into too deeply or for too long.
[1] Note that estimates on the amount of land varies from source to source
[2]Estimates vary wildly from $70 billion to over $160 billion.
👉 Join Abandoned America on Patreon for high quality photos & exclusive content
👉 Make a one-time donation to help keep the project going
👉 Listen to the new Abandoned America podcast
👉 Subscribe to our mailing list for news and updates
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|