Pretty amazing to see how quickly the world changes

Once upon a time ...

This looks like an illustration from some sort of suspense novel, but it's actually a picture of something that really used to exist. The park, originally called Jazzland and later Six Flags New Orleans, has been closed since just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005.

It certainly will never reopen. For one thing, it's difficult to see New Orleans itself returning to pre-Katrina levels of tourism. For another, the park was pretty much underwater for several weeks, and much of what existed before Katrina would have to be replaced for safety reasons.

A wonderful photo blog -- Love These Pics -- shows 75 different photos, including the one above. What's fascinating about it to me is that things change so quickly in this country and it isn't often we can still see what existed before.

Pripyat

Another site I recently discovered, Distractify, had a piece called "The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places on Earth." It opens with a previously thriving Ukranian city of 50,000 that was abandoned all at once in 1986.

In fact, not only was Pripyat abandoned, it may be thousands of years before anyone lives there again.

By now you may have guessed that Pripyat was a city built to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which basically blew up on April 26, 1986. The city was evacuated two days later.

The Distractify piece is really lovely, and not all the abandoned sites are so tragic. The City Hall subway station in New York City was in use from 1904-45, and was abandoned after that because even at its peak, no more than 600 people a day used the station.

Not everything that has been abandoned is as important. If you travel through Colorado, you will find all sorts of abandoned towns and camps, most of them connected with mines that played out long ago.

On a smaller scale, I have written before about my mother's home town of Crestline, Ohio, which was once a major railroad center. Up through World War II, Railroad Avenue had restaurants, hotels and stores that accommodated people who were between trains.

By 1960, when I was 10, all those businesses were abandoned, and within a few years after that they had been torn down.

Crestline was never a big city -- I think it peaked at about 6,000 -- but I remember at some point in the '60s riding on Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) just west of town. There was nothing but countryside and an occasional farm, until we passed a wooded area on the left. Back behind the trees, in an area that was pretty much overgrown, was the framework of part of a wooden roller coaster.

All things must pass, but some pass less quickly than others. Maybe the biggest chill -- of a good sort -- that I ever had was one day in July 1977 when I visited Rome for the only time in my life. My first wife and I were sightseeing, and we had lost track of where we were.

At one point, we turned a corner, and there in front of us was the Colosseum.

For the first time in my life, I realized, I was standing in front of something that had existed for more than two thousand years.

Since then I have seen Carcassone in France, which has existed since the seventh century A.D., and I have walked on the Great Wall of China, which has existed since hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.

Yes, things pass.

But they remain in our memories, and maybe that's all they need to last forever.