For more than 150 years, the New Orleans lakefront, with its cooling breezes off Lake Pontchartrain, has been a haven for New Orleanians escaping the summer heat. In the 1950s and 60s, post-World War II families enjoyed drives and picnics along the lake, watermelon stands, and most importantly Pontchartrain Beach and Lincoln Beach amusement parks. Times changed. Both are gone.
Pontchartrain Beach and Lincoln Beach, however, were not the first amusement parks along the city’s lakefront. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, weekenders boarded steam trains and electric streetcars and headed out for thrills and entertainment at West End Park, Milneburg at the end of Elysian Fields, and Old Spanish Fort on Bayou St. John near what is now the intersection of Wisner and Allen Toussaint Boulevard and Beauregard Avenue. Though long gone, their names are burned into the city’s history and culture. As seen in this 1919 photograph, Old Spanish Fort was the Pontchartrain Beach and Lincoln Beach of an earlier day.
Old Spanish Fort, then located at the mouth of Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain, began life as a recreational site in 1823 when the Federal government decommissioned the Spanish colonial fort and sold it to a local businessman who converted the fort into a hotel. Over the next seven decades developers expanded the park to include a theater, restaurants, the German-styled beer garden “Over the Rhine,” a casino and dance hall, a roller coaster, carousel and other rides, and the popular “Tokyo Gardens” and “The Frolics” cabarets.
The city’s opera company often performed here and George Paoletti’s band kept dancers gliding away on the park’s “highly polished dance floor.” Most important, however, many of the city’s best jazz bands and musicians played here, including Armand Piron, Papa Celestin and Johnny Bayersdorffer. As Al Rose and Edmond Souchon noted in their 1967 history of New Orleans jazz, Old Spanish Fort and other lakefront resorts were “hallowed” ground in the history of jazz.
Apparently, Pontchartrain Hotel was a must for visiting celebrities. According to the WPA’s 1938 guide to New Orleans, the hotel entertained dignitaries such as the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, William Makepeace Thackeray, General Grant and Oscar Wilde.
By early 1903 or 1904, however, Old Spanish Fort’s popularity waned and shortly thereafter fire destroyed most of its buildings. In 1909 the New Orleans Railway and Light Company purchased the property and revived the amusement park. By the 1920s, however, attendance once again declined with the rise of the nearby West End Park.
Spanish Fort finally closed in the early 1930s shortly after the Orleans Parish Levee Board extended the lake’s shoreline out from approximately today’s Allen Toussaint Boulevard to the area’s current seawall at Lakeshore Drive. The park’s amusement rides were moved to the new Pontchartrain Beach, and the land around Spanish Fort found new life as a residential development now known as Lake Vista.
All that remains of the original 18th century Spanish fort are a few brick ruins, an unmarked grave under the oaks, old photos and fading memories.
