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20 min audio
In 2024 a Sewerage and Water Board project on the 600 block of St. Peter Street had to halt when archaeologist D. Ryan Gray's team uncovered the city's first cemetery, two great-fire layers, and pre-colonial Indigenous artifacts. The pause was brief. The bodies are still there. There are estimated to be about eight thousand of them.
Old St. Peter Street Cemetery
On July 30, 1866, a meeting of Black freedmen and white Republican allies at the Mechanics Institute was attacked by a white mob and the New Orleans police. Dozens of Black men were killed. The site is now the Roosevelt Hotel. The plaque acknowledging what happened was installed in 2016 — a hundred and fifty years late.
The Roosevelt New Orleans, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel
38 min audio
The most photographed house on Royal Street is sold to tourists as a haunting. The actual story is what an 1834 fire revealed in the attic, and what happened to the woman who owned the keys. She fled to Paris with the family fortune and never stood trial.
LaLaurie Mansion
The shutters on the third floor of the Old Ursuline Convent have been nailed shut, with consecrated nails, since the eighteenth century. The vampire legend that explains it is famous. The actual story is a French shipment of teenage girls sent to marry colonists, and what the church preferred not to say about what happened to them.
Old Ursuline Convent Museum
The cathedral's famous haunting is the sound of Latin Mass being sung by an unseen voice in the rain. The actual story is that in 1769, a Capuchin priest defied a Spanish governor by giving Catholic burial to five executed Frenchmen the colony was supposed to leave to rot. He pulled it off and was never punished.
St. Louis Cathedral
Muriel's restaurant on Jackson Square sets a table every night for Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan, who owned the building in 1788, lost it in a card game, and according to the restaurant's own version of the story, hanged himself on the second floor. The restaurant openly admits the story. The candle stays lit.
Muriel's Jackson Square
31 min audio
The plaque names Andrew Jackson. The square has been called Jackson Square since 1851. Before that it was Place d'Armes, the colonial parade ground, the public-execution square, and the place where the body of an escaped enslaved man named Squire was put on display in 1837 as a warning. The square has had three names. Two of them were scraped off.
St. Louis Cathedral
Congo Square is sold to tourists as the birthplace of jazz. Before that, it was a Sunday market for enslaved Africans. Before that, it was the colonial execution ground. The square is named for an enslaved man named Louis Congo, who in 1725 was forced to choose between bondage and becoming the colony's only public executioner.
Congo Square
The most-visited tomb in New Orleans belongs to a free woman of color named Marie Laveau, who has been mythologized as the Voodoo Queen. The actual nineteenth-century evidence describes something more interesting: a multilingual hairdresser to the white elite who built one of the most effective informal intelligence networks in the antebellum South.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 Official Tour
53 min audio
The St. Louis Hotel rotunda was, for two decades, the most theatrical slave-auction floor in the American South. Solomon Northup was sold a few blocks away in June 1841. The building was demolished after the 1915 hurricane. The Omni Royal Orleans now stands on the site, with no marker on the lobby tile.
Omni Royal Orleans
The Bourbon Orleans Hotel sells its ballroom as a Creole heritage venue. The events held there in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, called Quadroon Balls, were a marketplace where free women of color were contracted as long-term mistresses to white men under the institution called plaçage. The chandelier is original. The contracts had price lists.
Bourbon Orleans Hotel
From 1897 to 1917, a sixteen-block stretch of New Orleans was the only legally regulated red-light district in the United States. It produced piano players named Jelly Roll Morton, Tony Jackson, and a teenage Louis Armstrong. The district was shut down by the federal government in 1917. The buildings were demolished in the 1930s. What replaced them was demolished in 2013. There is nothing left to walk through. The block is the erasure.
200 Basin St
On March 14, 1891, a white mob of approximately eight thousand stormed the Parish Prison in New Orleans and lynched eleven Italian immigrants who had just been acquitted of the murder of the city's police chief. It was the largest mass lynching in American history. The city took a hundred and twenty-eight years to apologize.
Municipal Auditorium
Between 1939 and 1972, almost every Black musician who toured through the segregated American South stayed at the Dew Drop Inn, a single building on a residential street in the Seventh Ward run by a barber named Frank Painia. Ray Charles slept here. James Brown slept here. The building is still standing. Most people in New Orleans have never heard of it.
Dew Drop Inn Hotel & Lounge - Historic Boutique Hotel in New Orleans LA
8 min audio | 2 stops
Two stops on planned resistance in and around New Orleans: Homer Plessy's choreographed arrest at Press and Royal, and Charles Deslondes's 1811 German Coast uprising, remembered today at Whitney Plantation. This is New Orleans as legal strategy, armed revolt, and public warning.
Homer Plessy did not stumble into history. The arrest at the corner of Press and Royal on June 7, 1892 was a planned act of civil disobedience by a New Orleans Creole-of-color committee that picked the date, the train, the conductor, and the detective in advance — and lost the case anyway, for fifty-eight years.
Homer Plessy Historical Marker
On January 8, 1811, an enslaved overseer named Charles Deslondes led the largest slave uprising in United States history up the River Road from a sugar plantation in what is now Reserve, Louisiana. Within four days the revolt had been crushed, the men tried at Destrehan Plantation, and ninety-five severed heads placed on poles along sixty miles of River Road from the German Coast to New Orleans as a warning. The revolt was deliberately written out of American textbooks for one hundred and seventy years.
Whitney Plantation Museum (1811 German Coast Memorial)
8 min audio | 2 stops
Two Central City stops where New Orleans culture survived without needing permission: Buddy Bolden's First Street house, where the first jazz band left no recordings, and Hunter's Field, where Black Masking Indians turn rivalry, memory, and handwork into a living annual tradition.
Charles Buddy Bolden, the cornetist most jazz historians credit with the first jazz band, lived at 2309 First Street in Central City. He was committed to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson on June 5, 1907 and died there twenty-four years later. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Holt Cemetery — the city's pauper field — under a monument that was only placed in 1996. No recordings of his playing have ever been found.
Buddy Bolden's House
Every March, on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph's Day, the Black Masking Indians of New Orleans gather at A. L. Davis Park in Central City — the field locals call Hunter's Field — in suits that took six to twelve months to bead, cost between five and twenty thousand dollars, and honor a tradition that ran on knives and razors well into the nineteen-fifties. Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles, born in this neighborhood in 1941, has been masking for over fifty years.
A. L. Davis Park / Hunter's Field
9 min audio | 2 stops
Two unmarked addresses where New Orleans remembers violence unevenly: Robert Charles's 1900 standoff and the white mob killings around it, and the Axeman's first known attack on an Italian-American grocery family in Uptown. Both stories sit in residential blocks with almost no public signal.
On the night of July 23, 1900, a Black laborer named Robert Charles was beaten on a Central City stoop by three New Orleans police officers. He drew a gun, fled, and over the next four days killed four officers and wounded more, while a white mob killed at least twenty-eight other Black New Orleanians in retaliation. The standoff ended when his hideout at 1208 Saratoga was set on fire. He was thirty-five. His story did not appear in a New Orleans school textbook for eighty years.
Robert Charles Site — 2023 Fourth Street
The Axeman of New Orleans murdered Italian-American grocers from May 1918 through October 1919. The case is often told as a jazz-themed novelty — the unsigned letter to the Times-Picayune, postmarked Hell, demanding the city play jazz on the night of March 19, 1919. The actual case was a year and a half of attacks on the same Italian-immigrant community whose eleven members had been lynched at the Parish Prison in 1891. The case has never been solved. The first attack was here, at 4901 Magnolia, in May 1918.
Maggio Grocery Site — 4901 Magnolia Street
8 min audio | 2 stops
Two stops through New Orleans Voodoo outside the souvenir version: Doctor John Montanet's Bayou Road square, where a Senegalese-born practitioner rivaled Marie Laveau, and the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on North Rampart, where Mother Miriam Chamani still keeps a working practice alive.
Marie Laveau was not the only Voodoo practitioner in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She was not even the most expensive one. Jean Montanet — Doctor John, Bayou John — was a Senegalese-born former enslaved man who bought a square block of Bayou Road between Prieur and Roman, ran a healing and conjure practice that out-charged Laveau two-to-one, and was profiled by Lafcadio Hearn in Harper's Weekly the year he died. The gift-shop version has room for one Voodoo Queen. The actual record had at least sixteen practitioners. He was the loudest of them.
Bayou Road & N. Prieur — Doctor John's Square
The Voodoo Spiritual Temple, founded in 1990 by Priestess Miriam Chamani and her late husband Priest Oswan Chamani, has been a continuously operating spiritual house for thirty-six years. The original Creole cottage at 828 North Rampart was destroyed by an electrical fire in February 2016. Priestess Miriam relocated the temple three blocks north to 1428 North Rampart and reopened. It is not a gift shop. It is the active spiritual practice that the city's tourist economy spent eighty years pretending didn't exist.
Voodoo Spiritual Temple