Their cousins on the south shore had a virtual pleasure palace called the Pontchartain Amusement Park. With encroaching industrial pollution and human waste, the park went the way of the passenger pigeon. All that's left of the north shore recreational outlet is a Seoul and shallow water that reveals old boots, cheap trinkets and kelp and dead fish. Lake Pontchartrain, one of Louisiana's great natural wonders, offers a breathtaking view of the NorthShore and, on a clear day, the skyscrapers of New Orleans. But, even that may be changing.
Old timers say that the lake, through an evolutionary change in tidal cycles is cleansing itself.
The seagulls have returned and even the state bird, the pelican, has been roosting on the breakwaters that jut out into the lake. This large body of water is said to receive a mix of freshwater from Lake Maurepas, the Tangipahoa and Tchefuncte Rivers, Bayous Lacombe and Bonfouca and saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico. Historians claim that human life began in the area 3,500 years ago, but that the population really began to increase with the influx of European immigrants nearly 300 years ago. Sometime in the early 1700s, the Anglo-Saxons established themselves north of the lake and began shipping fur and cured meats to a warm water port at Pass Manchac. But, as with the taming of the west by railraod links and mass communication, the lake area really began to open up with the advent of the Pony Express.