When it was announced last month that yet another plan to redevelop the site of the old Six Flags theme park in New Orleans had fallen through, most people’s reactions were the same.

“There’s a Six Flags in New Orleans?”

It turns out there is — or was — a Six Flags way out in the Ninth Ward, and since its closing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it’s been the subject of a few failed attempts to rebuild.

The market wouldn’t be able to sustain the upscale outlet mall they had planned, the developers said after the most recent plan fell through.

Good.

We all have memories from Six Flags, or someplace like it. Some loud, brightly colored place where men in funny suits sell you overpriced food and drinks until you run off and make yourself sick.

Sounds like somewhere else in New Orleans, doesn’t it?

I visited Six Flags last night, though security turned me away at the entrance and I did not, let me emphasize that, not, climb through chicken-wire fences and overgrown thickets to skulk through the shadows, dodging security like a mouse skittering through a kitchen in the middle of the night.

Despite not having done all that, I imagine an abandoned amusement park would be a seriously depressing place. Amusement parks are a 151-proof distillation of childhood nostalgia, with all the vomiting and awful smells that entails.

My friend who accompanied me on our extremely legal trip mentioned how just the sight of the decrepit roller coasters silhouetted on the sky gave him that same pit-of-the-stomach excitement he felt as a kid.

So do we really want to pave our childhood paradise and put up a shopping mall?

Our night ended, as so many New Orleans stories do, in the French Quarter, blinded by the neon signs of Bourbon. It was just a Wednesday night in May, but the street was still littered with the usual mix of vagrants and drunken tourists.

But as we rode the streetcar back to St. Charles, it wasn’t the apparently drug-addled man sitting across from me, clutching a dilapidated saxophone and moaning about Walgreens that bothered me. It was a small group of Ohio mid-level businessmen huddled together, looking terrified at the world around them but chatting happily about their motorcycle trips and summer homes in Maine.

These are the people that Bourbon Street now attracts, and it’s depressing.

A place that used to be known as the absolute embodiment of genuine New Orleans culture is now just another tourist trap, filled with bars bumping the Black Eyed Peas and gift shops selling beads year-round.

It’s easy to think of New Orleans as a party city.

It’s not inaccurate, but it ignores too much, and it means you’re going to attract a horde of used car salesmen and accountants chasing the head-spinning highs we used to get from places like Six Flags.

Katrina caused a lot of destruction, much of which still hasn’t been fixed, but it couldn’t take away the spirit and energy that has made the city famous. Even among the water damage and capsized magnolias, New Orleans is still a vibrant, gritty city that remains the pride of its citizens.

It’s worth not selling out.

Gordon Brillon is a 19-year-old Mass Communication sophomore from Lincoln, R.I.