The Saint Louis Cathedral is an iconic fixture of the New Orleans landscape. The present structure is at least the third building to serve as a Catholic church here since the French occupied the territory in 1718. In 2024, three hundred years after…

For over fifty years, the Bridge City Gumbo Festival has served up a family-oriented and fun-filled weekend at the base of the Huey P. Long Bridge across from New Orleans on the Westbank of the Mississippi River. It began in 1967 as a small, local…

The Maison has one of the most varied music lineups on Frenchmen St, hosting rock, funk, brass bands, jazz, fusion and more. Singer and bandleader Sierra Green has been a regular part of the calendar on many memorable nights over the last decade.…

We wandered into Bicycle Michael’s one day in 2019 to ask Ferrand and longtime bike mechanic/philosopher Tim Eskew if they had any particularly memorable stories they wanted to share from their tenure on Frenchmen Street. To which Tim responded, “Do…

The second-line parade is a quintessentially Black New Orleans tradition rooted in historic jazz funerals, although not all second-lines today are funeral second-lines. The name refers to the “second line” of everyday revelers who follow in the wake…

Curtis Casados, a longtime bartender who’s worked at various Frenchmen locations over the years (read his Spotted Cat storm story here), has always been struck by the camaraderie he’s felt on the street. “Frenchmen itself was just a big large…

The lot may not have looked like much, but this non-space took on a life of its own, growing slowly and organically into an unconventional hub for neighborhood creatives, a beloved local institution owned by no one and shared by all. Alan…

When world-famous musicians come to perform in New Orleans, sometimes they then go sit in on local gigs, and lucky audience members occasionally catch the magic moment. As Margie Perez remembers: “It was the first anniversary of Katrina, in August…

Café Brasil, as you might gather from its name, was a major hub for the Latin scene that once flourished on Frenchmen Street. But it was host to a whole smorgasbord of musical weeklies as well. “Monday night they had a jazz band; Tuesday night,…

The Spotted Cat, open since 2001, hosts a variety of modern and traditional jazz, brass bands and brass/funk fusion. When Jeremy was a teenager he had his own brass band, and although they were too young to get into the Cat, they’d always stand…

One of the things that makes Frenchmen Street such a unique cultural corridor—one that boasts a notably outsized impact for its two-and-a-half block length—is the sheer density of venues packed into the tiny strip. In the late ‘90s, Frenchmen…

In 2014, the University of New Orleans was invited to conduct archaeological testing at 936 St. Peter Street while the property was undergoing renovations. Below the surface layer, archaeologists discovered the opening of a privy shaft. The privy…

A hundred years ago, the area around the 2400 block of Lamanche Street was occupied by the Temple of the Innocent Blood, a spiritism church that was created and run by Mother Catherine Seals. From 1922 until her death in 1930, Mother Catherine…

Today the blocks bound by Magnolia, Seventh, Freret, and Sixth streets appear to be a vacant greenspace. However, for nearly a century, these two blocks housed the Thomy Lafon School complex. Originally built in 1906, the property operated as a…

By some estimates, nearly 50,000 burials lie beneath Canal Boulevard, originally Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2. Almost forgotten since Canal Boulevard's addition to the city's roadways in 1937, road crews rediscovered the cemetery when they added…

In 2007, a team of archaeologists excavated the remains of a property enumerated “253 Carondelet Walk,” an address that had at one point operated as a nineteenth-century kiln manufactory along the walkway of the historical “Carondelet Canal.”…

In the early 2000s, New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) planned a route change to the streetcar line on Canal Street so that its terminus would extend to Canal Boulevard. By 2004, RTA hired Earth Search, Inc. (ESI), a local cultural…

Charity Hospital was an iconic institution in the history of New Orleans, and at the time of its closure in 2015, one of the longest lasting public institutions in the United States. Both Charity Hospital and its cemeteries are indelibly linked to…

In 2017, Dr. D. Ryan Gray led students and volunteers from University of New Orleans to excavate a portion of a private residence in the French Quarter located at 626 Bourbon Street. The team excavated a series of test units and shovel tests in the…

Madame John’s Legacy is a National Historic Landmark and a property of the Louisiana State Museum. Throughout its history the true stories of those families and individuals who owned or have been associated with this house and property are equaled…