Louisiana carries its abandoned places differently from any other American state. With 198 documented abandoned places on the Urbex Maps atlas, the count is lower than Texas or Florida, but the depth of history behind each site is extraordinary -- this is a state where the 18th century, the antebellum era, the Civil War, two centuries of hurricane damage, and the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina all left physical traces in the landscape that have never been fully cleared. Abandoned plantations line the River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, their sugar mills and slave quarters slowly collapsing into the subtropical vegetation. Louisiana's abandonment is not primarily the product of deindustrialization, though the petrochemical industry has certainly produced its share of derelict infrastructure along the Mississippi River corridor. It is the product of water. Flood, storm surge, and the slow creep of subsidence on a delta that is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico at a measurable rate every year -- these are the forces that create and preserve Louisiana's deserted plantations, ghost towns, and urban ruins.
New Orleans anchors the state's urbex geography as it anchors everything else in Louisiana. The city lost 140,000 residents in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and while much of the population has returned, entire neighborhoods -- particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East -- remain at fractions of their pre-storm density. Katrina did not just flood buildings; it broke the economic logic that had kept marginal structures occupied and maintained. When the water receded, the city was left with an inventory of abandoned properties that included not just houses and commercial buildings but an art deco hospital with 2,680 beds, a Six Flags theme park, and a brick Civil War fort on a tidal pass east of the city.
This guide covers 10 of the most iconic abandoned places in Louisiana, from Charity Hospital in the heart of New Orleans to the sugar mill ruins of the Teche Country. Every spot has free GPS coordinates on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas, a YouTube video embed, historical context, and access notes.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps works
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No paywall for these 10, no account required -- just coordinates on an interactive map with access notes that work on mobile. The full Louisiana database has 198 locations and growing, covering everything from New Orleans post-Katrina ruins to antebellum plantation infrastructure in the bayou country.
1. Charity Hospital, New Orleans
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Charity Hospital in New Orleans is one of the most significant abandoned buildings in the United States -- a 1939 Art Deco tower of 20 stories, 2,680 beds, and 85 years of history as the primary safety-net hospital for Louisiana's poorest residents, sitting empty on Tulane Avenue since Hurricane Katrina flooded the lower floors in August 2005. The building was not destroyed by Katrina. The flooding was limited to the basement and first floors, and the hospital's staff kept patients alive for several days after the storm before emergency evacuation. After the storm, state officials determined that reopening Charity was not economically justified and announced plans to build a new University Medical Center campus nearby.
Charity Hospital was established by an act of the French colonial government in 1736, making it one of the oldest continuously operating hospitals in the United States at the time of its closure -- a nearly 270-year institutional history terminated by the decision to abandon a structurally sound building rather than repair limited flood damage. The 1939 building, designed in an Art Deco style that was already somewhat retro by the time it opened, was a New Deal-era institution of extraordinary scale: at the time of its construction, it was the second-largest hospital in the world, designed to provide free medical care to anyone in Louisiana who needed it regardless of ability to pay.
The decision to abandon Charity rather than reopen it was one of the most controversial post-Katrina policy choices in Louisiana, argued over by physicians, community advocates, public health researchers, and politicians for a decade. Preservationists noted that the building's structure was sound and its Art Deco character irreplaceable. Healthcare advocates argued that the decision to build a new private-public hospital system rather than repair the public hospital represented a fundamental shift in Louisiana's commitment to free care for the poor. As of the mid-2020s, the building remains empty, a 20-story monument to a policy argument that has never been fully resolved, while the new University Medical Center operates nearby.
2. Six Flags New Orleans (Jazzland), Eastern New Orleans
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Six Flags New Orleans is the most famous post-Katrina ruin in the United States and one of the most photographed abandoned amusement parks in the world. The park opened in 2000 under the name Jazzland, developed by a local operator on a 140-acre site in Eastern New Orleans as a regional theme park serving the Gulf Coast market. Six Flags acquired and rebranded the park in 2002, investing in new rides and expanding its offerings. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded the park with approximately seven feet of standing water.
The damage was severe but not absolute -- the structures survived, and Six Flags initially indicated it might attempt to reopen the park after cleanup. But the economics of post-Katrina New Orleans made reopening a 140-acre theme park in a flood-damaged, half-emptied neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city impossible to justify. Six Flags formally abandoned the property in 2006, walking away from its lease and leaving the park in exactly the condition Katrina left it: roller coasters standing with their tracks intact, water park slides rising from stagnant water, kiddie rides in place, and the park's Six Flags signage still visible on the abandoned structures.
For nearly two decades, the abandoned Six Flags became a landmark of post-Katrina New Orleans: a 140-acre visual testament to the storm's consequences, widely photographed by documentarians, urban explorers, and artists from around the world. The New Orleans city government struggled to find a viable redeveloper for the site for years. Demolition of the park finally began in 2024, when the city reached an agreement with a developer to clear the site for an Amazon logistics center. The demolition marks the end of one of the most iconic abandoned landscapes in American urbex history.
3. Fort Macomb, Eastern New Orleans
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Fort Macomb stands at the mouth of the Chef Menteur Pass, a strategic water route connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico east of New Orleans, where it has been deteriorating since the United States Army abandoned it in 1871. The fort was built between 1822 and 1828 as part of the Third System of American coastal fortification -- the generation of brick masonry forts that was also building Fort Monroe in Virginia, Fort Pulaski in Georgia, and Fort Jackson in Louisiana at approximately the same time -- and it guards one of the approaches to New Orleans that British forces had used during their 1815 attempt to take the city.
Fort Macomb is a pentagonal fortification with thick brick walls designed to mount heavy artillery on two tiers, commanding the narrow tidal channel of Chef Menteur Pass. Its construction followed the design principles of engineer Simon Bernard, a French officer who had served under Napoleon and came to the United States after Waterloo to help design the American coastal defense system. The fort was garrisoned intermittently through the Civil War, when Confederate forces held it briefly before Union forces took possession without a fight, and used as a signal station and logistical point through the war.
The Army abandoned Fort Macomb in 1871 when the development of rifled artillery made masonry forts obsolete. The brick walls have been deteriorating since then, exposed to the salt air and hurricane surge of the Louisiana coast. Katrina inflicted significant additional damage, and the fort's condition continues to worsen without active stabilization. It is one of the few surviving Third System forts in the country and one of the least known, sitting on private land on a tidal pass that most New Orleans residents could not locate on a map. Access is restricted and requires permission; the site is not regularly open to visitors. Fort Macomb is also featured in our 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots guide.
4. Carville Leper Colony (National Hansen's Disease Museum), Carville
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The Louisiana Leper Home at Carville -- later renamed the National Leprosarium and now the site of the National Hansen's Disease Museum -- was the only leprosy treatment facility in the continental United States and one of the most extraordinary institutions in American medical history. Leprosy (now properly called Hansen's disease) was poorly understood in the late 19th century, and public fear of contagion was severe enough that Louisiana established a forced isolation colony for leprosy patients in 1894, acquiring a former sugar plantation on the Mississippi River at Carville, Iberville Parish, for the purpose.
The institution grew from a small riverside plantation to a self-contained community of 330 acres with 27 buildings -- patient dormitories, a hospital, a chapel, a recreation hall, a post office, and support facilities -- all enclosed by a security fence that patients could not leave without official authorization. The isolation was both medical and social: patients surrendered their civil rights upon admission, could not vote, could not marry without special permission, and received mail that was fumigated before delivery. Many patients spent decades or their entire lives at Carville.
The last active patients left Carville in 1999, when outpatient treatment made long-term institutionalization obsolete. The National Hansen's Disease Museum was established on the grounds in 2000, preserving several of the historic buildings and maintaining an archive of patient records, photographs, and oral histories. Most of the 27 buildings survive on the site, with varying states of preservation and access. The campus is accessible through the museum, which offers guided tours of the historic facilities and grounds. Carville represents a uniquely American intersection of medical history, civil rights history, and institutional architecture -- a place where hundreds of people lived their entire adult lives in enforced isolation on a Mississippi River levee.
5. Old Governor's Mansion (deteriorating wings), Baton Rouge
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The Old Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge was built in 1930 at the personal direction of Governor Huey Long, who wanted a Louisiana governor's residence that resembled the White House -- down to the white-columned neoclassical facade, the circular driveway, and the portico. Long's political rivals derided it as a "miniature White House," a characterization that has stuck. The building served as the official residence of Louisiana's governors from 1930 to 1963, housing a succession of administrations through the Long political dynasty and the post-war reform era.
Governor Jimmy Davis moved the official executive residence to a new mansion in 1963, and the Old Governor's Mansion has been operated as a historic museum ever since. The main public rooms on the principal floor -- the state dining room, the parlors, the formal rooms where Huey Long held court during his domination of Louisiana politics in the early 1930s -- have been restored and are open for tours. The building's connection to Long, one of the most significant and controversial figures in 20th-century American politics, gives it an outsized historical importance relative to its size.
The rear service wings of the mansion, less architecturally distinguished and less visited, have deteriorated more severely and represent the genuinely abandoned portion of the property. The combination of the restored front rooms and the deteriorating service areas creates a split-personality site that is interesting from a preservation standpoint. The Louisiana Governor's Mansion, as the property is formally known when it functions as a museum, is open for public tours on a scheduled basis through the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation.
6. Longleaf Sawmill Company Town, Rapides Parish
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The Longleaf Sawmill company town in Rapides Parish is one of the most complete surviving examples of the Louisiana lumber industry company town, a settlement type that was extraordinarily common in the state between 1880 and 1930 and has almost entirely disappeared. Louisiana's longleaf pine forests were one of the richest timber resources in North America: vast stands of old-growth pine stretching across the central and northern parishes, producing clear lumber that was in demand across the country for construction, flooring, and ship timbers.
The Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company established its sawmill and company town at Longleaf in 1893, building a full community infrastructure around the mill: company housing for workers, a hotel for management, a theater for entertainment, a commissary where workers were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores, a school, a church, and eventually over 50 structures on the company's townsite. At its peak, the mill employed over 1,000 workers and produced millions of board feet of lumber annually.
The longleaf pine forests were exhausted by the 1950s. The mill at Longleaf closed in 1956, and the company town was abandoned. Unlike many lumber towns whose structures were dismantled and the materials reused, Longleaf was simply left standing. More than 50 of the original structures survive, including the hotel, the commissary, the theater, and worker housing, all in various states of deterioration but still standing in the second-growth forest that has replaced the original pine. Longleaf is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been the subject of preservation studies, though active stabilization has been limited. Access requires navigating unpaved forest roads; the site is on private land.
7. Camp Villere (Louisiana Maneuver Area), Slidell
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Camp Villere and the Louisiana Maneuver Area represent the military geography of the Gulf South during World War II, when Louisiana's relatively flat terrain and mild climate made it an ideal location for large-scale troop training exercises. The Louisiana Maneuvers of 1940 and 1941 were among the largest military exercises ever conducted on American soil, involving hundreds of thousands of troops rehearsing the combined arms tactics that would be needed for the war that was clearly coming. General George S. Patton, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General Walter Krueger all commanded units during the Louisiana Maneuvers, and the exercises are credited with identifying a generation of effective commanders before combat revealed them.
Camp Villere, located in the longleaf pine and tupelo swamp country northeast of Slidell in St. Tammany Parish, was one of the support facilities for the Louisiana Maneuver Area -- a training installation with barracks, administrative buildings, motor pools, and the other infrastructure of a temporary military camp. The facility was built quickly in the early 1940s using standard Army cantonment construction: wood-frame or concrete block buildings on concrete slab foundations, utilitarian and impermanent by design.
The camp was decommissioned after the war and the land was transferred to the Louisiana Army National Guard, which has used portions of it for training purposes. Other portions have been abandoned, with the WWII-era concrete structures slowly being reclaimed by the pine and tupelo forest. The combination of military history -- the camp sits within the broader landscape of the Louisiana Maneuver Area, one of the most significant training exercises in American military history -- and the physical remains of the cantonment-era construction makes Camp Villere an interesting site for military history researchers and urbex explorers.
8. St. Mary's Sugar Mill, Jeanerette
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The sugar mill industry along Bayou Teche in St. Mary and Iberia parishes produced a specific architectural type -- the plantation sugar factory -- that was once as common in the Teche Country as cotton gins were in the Mississippi Delta. Sugar production requires industrial-scale processing: the cane must be crushed to extract the juice, the juice clarified and boiled to crystallization, the raw sugar centrifuged and dried -- all within a narrow window after the cane is cut, because the sucrose content degrades quickly. The processing facilities that served these requirements were large, complex industrial buildings housing steam-powered crushers, multiple-effect evaporators, and centrifuge galleries.
The sugar mill on the St. Mary's plantation near Jeanerette dates to the 1840s, built when the Teche Country sugar industry was reaching its antebellum peak. The original brick walls of the factory building still stand, though the interior structure and mechanical equipment were gutted by a fire in the 1990s that destroyed the roof and interior floors. The surviving brick shell -- two to three stories of heavy masonry construction with the characteristic arched window openings and deep wall sections of industrial 19th-century construction -- stands among the cane fields along Bayou Teche.
Sugar mill ruins of this completeness are increasingly rare in Louisiana. The combination of industrial fires, hurricane damage, and the relentless subtropical vegetation that attacks any unoccupied masonry structure means that antebellum sugar factory walls rarely survive more than a generation after the last processing season. The St. Mary's mill walls have survived because their heavy construction has resisted collapse even as the interior has been completely consumed. The site is on private agricultural land; the walls are visible from the Bayou Teche corridor.
9. Downtown Baton Rouge Historical Tunnels
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Beneath the streets of downtown Baton Rouge, a network of 19th-century tunnels and underground passages connects several of the older civic and commercial buildings, dating to the mid-to-late 1800s and associated with the various phases of the city's development as the Louisiana state capital. These passages -- some constructed for utilitarian purposes related to the elevated foundations required on low-lying Mississippi River bottomland, others connected to the antebellum commercial infrastructure of the city -- are mostly sealed today, with access points blocked or flooded.
The history of these underground spaces is poorly documented, in part because they were never officially catalogued and in part because the periodic Mississippi River flooding that has shaped Baton Rouge's development history has filled many passages with silt and debris. Local historians have documented the existence of several tunnel sections connecting buildings in the old commercial district near the waterfront, and excavation work on downtown construction projects has repeatedly encountered 19th-century masonry below the street level.
The tunnels represent a category of abandoned urban infrastructure that exists beneath many older American river cities -- the underground remnants of a pre-modern urban landscape where buildings were constructed on raised foundations, connected by covered passages to avoid the street-level mud, and provided with basement storage for goods that arrived by river. Access to the Baton Rouge tunnels is restricted and in many cases physically impossible due to flooding and collapse, but they occupy a persistent place in local historical consciousness as an underground layer of the city's documented past.
10. New Canal Lighthouse, New Orleans
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The New Canal Lighthouse on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain at the end of the New Basin Canal was first constructed in 1839 to mark the canal's entrance for vessels entering from the lake. The lighthouse went through multiple reconstructions over the following century, with the current structure -- a two-story wooden keeper's house built on a concrete pier in the lake -- dating to 1890. For generations it served as the navigational marker for one of the most important commercial waterways in New Orleans, the New Basin Canal that connected the city's 19th-century commercial district to Lake Pontchartrain and the broader coastal trade network.
The New Basin Canal was filled in during the 1950s to create a surface roadway (now Veterans Memorial Boulevard and the lakefront expressway), making the lighthouse's navigational function obsolete. The structure was decommissioned by the Coast Guard. Hurricane Katrina's storm surge in 2005 severely damaged the surrounding infrastructure and the access pier, leaving the lighthouse isolated on its concrete platform in the lake. The immediate physical context of the lighthouse -- the former canal terminus, the lakefront seawall, the adjacent infrastructure -- was substantially altered by Katrina and subsequent flood control improvements.
The lighthouse itself was restored and reopened as part of a lakeshore cultural center operated by the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. The main lighthouse structure has been rehabilitated and is publicly accessible as part of the foundation's educational and interpretive programming. However, the broader landscape around it -- the former canal infrastructure, the pre-Katrina waterfront development, the damaged and unrestored elements of the lakefront corridor -- retains a character of post-storm abandonment and incomplete recovery that contextualizes the lighthouse within the broader Katrina story.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Abandoned Places in Louisiana
How many abandoned places are there in Louisiana?
The Urbex Maps database currently lists 198 verified abandoned locations across Louisiana, a figure that reflects both the concentrated impact of Hurricane Katrina on a specific urban area and the broader pattern of rural abandonment in the state's plantation and timber country. Louisiana's actual inventory of abandoned structures is certainly higher, particularly in the rural parishes of central and northern Louisiana.
Is urbex legal in Louisiana?
Criminal trespass in Louisiana is governed by R.S. 14:63 and is a misdemeanor, generally carrying a fine for first-time offenders on private property. Many locations in this guide have specific access provisions: the National Hansen's Disease Museum at Carville is open to public tours, the Old Governor's Mansion offers scheduled tours, and Fort Macomb requires private landowner permission. Six Flags New Orleans was in active demolition in 2024 and is entirely off-limits.
What is the most famous abandoned place in Louisiana?
Charity Hospital in New Orleans is the most historically significant, carrying nearly 270 years of institutional history and a direct connection to Katrina policy debates. Six Flags New Orleans is the most internationally recognized in urbex communities, having been photographed by documentarians and explorers from around the world for nearly two decades before demolition began in 2024.
Why did Six Flags New Orleans never reopen?
Six Flags walked away from the Jazzland/Six Flags New Orleans lease in 2006 because the economic case for reopening a 140-acre theme park in a flood-damaged, largely depopulated neighborhood in Eastern New Orleans was untenable. The park sat at the edge of the city's flood-damaged eastern expansion area, a neighborhood that lost most of its pre-storm population and has struggled with recovery. The combination of flood remediation costs, reduced regional population, and the financial difficulty of the Six Flags corporate entity made reopening economically impossible.
Can you visit Charity Hospital?
Charity Hospital is a privately owned building (the state transferred it to a private entity) and is not open to public tours. The building is visible from the street and surrounding areas. Various documentary filmmakers and journalists have been granted access to the interior for specific projects. The ongoing debate over the building's future -- preservation advocates continue to push for rehabilitation -- means that its status may change; check current news for any changes to public access or ownership.
What is the best time to visit Louisiana for abandoned places exploration?
November through March offers the best conditions in Louisiana. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 35 degrees Celsius with extremely high humidity, making any enclosed abandoned space oppressively hot and dangerous. Hurricane season (June through November, with peak risk in August and September) adds weather risk. The relatively mild winter and early spring months, when vegetation is less dense and temperatures are moderate, are ideal for exterior and interior exploration of Louisiana sites.
Conclusion: Louisiana's waterlogged history
Louisiana's abandoned places are inseparable from water. The Mississippi River built the land the state stands on, and hurricanes periodically remind Louisiana that the delta it occupies is a temporary arrangement. Katrina's legacy is visible in Charity Hospital, the vacant Six Flags site, and the thousands of properties across New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth that never recovered from 2005. The antebellum era's legacy persists in the sugar mill ruins along the Teche and the lumber company towns of the central parishes. The Civil War left Fort Macomb on its tidal pass. With 198 spots on the Urbex Maps atlas, Louisiana's abandonment is dense with history and permanently shaped by geography.
Explore more abandoned places in the United States
- ●Abandoned Places in Georgia: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Tennessee: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Florida: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Indiana: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
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- ●Abandoned Places USA: 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots
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