Pontchartrain Beach

For fifty-five summers Pontchartrain Beach was where New Orleans went to be a family. The Zephyr wooden coaster, the Laff in the Dark, the Bali Ha'i tiki bar on the water, the biggest kiddie-land in the South. Fats Domino played the bandstand. The Nevilles played the bandstand. On a summer Sunday night the whole city smelled like fried food and lake water.

It closed Labor Day 1983 — couldn't compete with Six Flags in LaPlace, and coastal subsidence had been eating the lakefront for years. The Batt family, who had owned it for three generations, sold the land to UNO. The Zephyr's timbers went to Ohio. Where it all stood: the Advanced Technology Center, a Navy SPAWAR building, and a parking lot. The Batt family still holds a reunion every October for people who worked there. A few hundred still come. That's what's left of it.