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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.
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City context
New Orleans tells ghost stories to avoid telling the harder ones. This self-guided audio walking tour goes behind the LaLaurie mansion legend to the slavery underneath it, into Congo Square and St. Louis Cemetery where Marie Laveau really operated, through the bulldozed Storyville district, the hotels built on slave auctions, and the jazz that began with Buddy Bolden. We separate the documented history from the tourist folklore.
Tour chapters
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
15 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
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
LaLaurie's torture attic, the casket girls of Ursulines, a cathedral priest who sang the king's men to shame, a card game frozen in a haunted dining room, Homer Plessy's choreographed arrest at Press and Royal, and the 1811 German Coast uprising remembered at Whitney Plantation. Six stops where the Quarter's legends meet planned resistance.
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
Bras-Coupe at Jackson Square, Louis Congo's terrible bargain at Congo Square, Marie Laveau's information network, Buddy Bolden's First Street house where jazz began without a recording, and Hunter's Field, where Black Masking Indians keep the tradition alive. Five stops on survival without permission.
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
A hotel built over a slave exchange, the quadroon balls' contested ballroom, Storyville's erased blocks, the 1891 parish prison lynching, the Dew Drop Inn, Robert Charles's 1900 standoff, and the Axeman's first attack on Magnolia Street. Seven stops where New Orleans remembers violence unevenly.
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
13 min audio | 3 stops
The city's first cemetery dissolving under St. Peter Street, the Mechanics Institute massacre, Doctor John Montanet's Bayou Road square, and the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on North Rampart, where a working practice still lives. Four stops for the dead the postcards skip.
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
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
Every guidebook calls St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 the oldest in New Orleans, and tourists line up for Marie Laveau's tomb. They are standing in the half that survived. The rear third of the ground, the Protestant section and the section for people of African descent, was bisected by a new street in the 1830s, emptied, sold off as building lots in 1840, and paved. The Protestant dead were moved to Girod Street, which was itself erased in 1957. The poor and the people of color simply went under the city.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
Before the tailgates and the team store, this was the Girod Street Cemetery, the city's oldest Protestant burial ground, opened in 1822 and known as the yellow fever mound for the epidemic dead stacked in its vaults. It was deconsecrated in 1957 and its dead were moved on racial lines, whites to one cemetery, African Americans to another. Many were never moved at all. In 1987 a construction crew beside the Superdome dug some of them up by accident.
Girod Street Cemetery site, LaSalle Street
The Locust Grove cemeteries took the city's indigent dead, overwhelmingly poor and Black New Orleanians whose families could not pay for a marked grave, from the 1860s until they closed around 1880. In 1905 the city built the Thomy Lafon School for Black children directly on top of them, and in 1915 opened a playground for African American children recorded as the first in New Orleans. The bodies were never moved. When the school was finally demolished in 2011, archaeologists watching the dig brought up caskets, skulls, and bone.
Locust Grove cemeteries site, Thomy Lafon School
FAQ
Yes. You can hear a free web sample before you go, and if you are standing in New Orleans, the first 2 stops are free in the app before the subscription wall.
Yes. Download it before you go and it plays with no signal, no roaming charges, and no network connection required for playback.
Yes. You walk at your own pace and the tour gives you optional directions between stops only when you want them.
It covers New Orleans, Forgotten Graves, French Quarter Secrets, Slavery and Resistance, Violence and Vice, The LaLaurie Mansion, 600 St. Peter Street, Jackson Square, The Omni Royal Orleans, and New Orleans, part 15: Press and Royal, the Arrest That Was Planned in Advance.
36 chapters, about 5h 7m total. You can do them in any order.
We keep history honest. Instead of blending myth and fact, we separate what is documented, what is legend, and what nobody actually knows.