Thirteen thousand people showed up on opening day at Storyland in 1956, half a million in the first year, and the playground has barely slowed down since. Harry Batt Sr., who owned the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park, had been struggling to draw families to his kiddie rides in City Park when he encountered Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, California, and came home with a plan. He commissioned local Mardi Gras float builders, including members of the Blaine Kern family, to construct a collection of oversized, climbable storybook characters beneath the centenarian live oaks of City Park’s southwest corner.
The original 13 nursery rhyme scenes have since grown to 26 exhibits, each built in the same tradition as the parade floats that roll through the city each February, and that connection is not incidental.
The fiberglass fabrication techniques, the scale, the bold colors, and the physical durability of the sculptures all come directly from carnival float-building craft, which means Storyland functions as a kind of permanent, walk-through float den where Captain Hook’s pirate ship floats in real water, the Old Woman’s shoe has a tiny doorway that served as the original kids-only entrance, Old King Cole’s castle offers a stairway to its battlements, and Pinocchio’s whale is large enough to walk inside.
The park absorbed Katrina with minimal damage, a testament to how the sculptures were built to be climbed on rather than looked at. A major renovation in 2019 added four new exhibits and updated the existing collection, including an expansion of the Hey Diddle Diddle space into an ADA-accessible exhibit covering the history of NASA and featuring the spacesuit of New Orleans native and former NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. The beloved dragon slide, a fixture for decades where children climbed the dragon’s spine and plummeted down its belching flames, was retired in 2025 with plans for a replacement underway.
Newer additions pull from Louisiana mythology alongside the Grimm and Mother Goose canon. The Story Gator wears Bermuda shorts and plays a concertina. A bench sculpture of “Mama” Coleen Salley, a beloved New Orleans teacher and children’s author, sits with her marsupial sidekick Epossumondas from her picture books. These local characters give the park a layer of regional identity that no imported storybook franchise could replicate, and they’re the reason Storyland reads as genuinely New Orleanian rather than generic.
Admission is $6 per person, free for children under 36 inches tall, and includes access to the adjacent Carousel Gardens Amusement Park. Storyland is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It is closed on Mondays and from December through February. The entrance is on the north side of Victory Avenue inside City Park.
