Madame John’s Legacy, located at 628-632 Dumaine Street, is often considered one of the best surviving examples of French Colonial architecture in the French Quarter, even though the existing structure was built in 1788 during Spanish colonial rule. Developed by the 1720s, a building at the location burned in the great ‘Good Friday Fire’ of 1788. In 1947, after falling into disrepair, the property owner donated the extant structure to the Louisiana State Museum and it remains a museum to this day.

Captain Jean Pascal, an early owner of the property, died during the Natchez Revolt of 1729. Pascal’s widow, Elizabeth Real, maintained the property for 50 years, using it as both a residence and an inn through her second marriage to Francois Marin until her death in 1777. In 1783, Spanish officer Manuel DeLanzos purchased the property. DeLanzos was responsible for rebuilding the 1788 structure, apparently in a style similar to the structure that was damaged or destroyed in the 1788 fire. The building’s name derives from George Washington Cable’s famous short story “Tite Poulette.” While the “Madame John” from Cable’s story was fictional, it is possible Cable drew inspiration from past owners of the property.

Over the years, the site has been the subject of four different formal archaeological excavations, in addition to monitoring of renovations by museum personnel who collected artifacts disturbed by construction crews. Although each set of excavations had different goals, all have contributed to our understanding of the lot and the people who lived there.

Modified 8/31/2026

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Soon after Union forces seized New Orleans from the Confederacy in 1862, calls for equality reverberated among free people of color. Hundreds assembled at frequent mass meetings and rallies at Economy Hall in the heart of Faubourg Tremé. There, boisterous crowds listened to speakers advocate for racial democracy and the enfranchisement of all men of African descent. The newspapers L’Union, and later the New Orleans Tribune, frequently promoted and reported on these dramatic gatherings. “Grande Assemblée à L’Économie, Immense Enthousiasme,” recounted L’Union in 1863. [1] “A vast and enthusiastic assemblage met last evening at Economy Hall,” reported the Tribune in 1864. [2] “One of the most largely attended assemblies ever held in this city met last night at Economy Hall,” declared the Tribune in 1865.

Jean Baptiste Roudanez (1815-1895), a free man of color, served as publisher of L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper, and the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper. Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, the Tribune’s founder, was Jean Baptiste’s younger brother. Jean Baptiste Roudanez’s home still stands on Dumaine Street in the Faubourg Tremé. 

Jean Baptiste Roudanez, publisher of L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper, and the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper, is entombed alongside his mother Aimée Potens, a free woman of color, in Square 3 of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. This section of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 honors many civil rights pioneers of African descent, including Henriette Delille, Rodolphe Desdunes, Arthur Esteves, André Callioux, Jordan Noble, Marie Couvent, P.B.S. Pinchback, Oscar Dunne and many others. Square 3 has been described as “the greatest collection of memorials to African-American achievement in the world.”  

Roudanez and fellow activist Arnold Bertonneau delivered a historic petition to President Lincoln on March 12, 1864, demanding the right to vote. Signed by almost 1,000 free men of color from New Orleans, the document righteously proclaimed “WE ARE MEN, TREAT US AS SUCH!” For the first time, Louisianans of African descent boldly entered the whitest house in America, the inner sanctum of the country’s authority. They were frustrated with Lincoln’s gradualism and general failure to support the growing national movement for racial equality. [1]

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Faubourg Tremé is home to the oldest existing cemetery in the City of New Orleans, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, founder of the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first black daily newspaper, is entombed in the Roudanez family tomb located in Alley 9. The doctor’s wife, Célie Saulay, and several of their children are also in this tomb. Access is permitted only with approved tour guides. When in the cemetery, be sure to ask your guide to see the Roudanez tomb.

Like many free people of color in New Orleans, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez was wealthy, grew up with the French language, attended Catholic Church, and received much of his education in Paris. Roudanez’s parents were racially mixed refugees from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), leaving after the island’s successful slave rebellion began in 1791. [1] 

On July 30, 1866, black Republicans attempted to reconvene the Louisiana constitutional convention in an effort to secure voting rights. Held at the Mechanics' Institute, a large crowd of black spectators was present as well. The gathering was attacked by an angry white mob that included police and firemen. [1] According to the Tribune, "black men were assassinated by scores. They fell inside of the hall, outside of the building, in the neighboring streets, and even in distant parts of the city, where they were tracked like dogs." [2] Tribune editor Jean-Charles Houzeau witnessed the bloodbath and heard the assassins shout "To the Tribune!" He claimed the newspaper was saved by a detail of black soldiers. [3]

In November 1866, the Tribune moved from its offices on Conti Street to 122-124 Exchange Alley. These new digs were in the shadow of the St. Louis Hotel (site now occupied by the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel). The St. Louis Hotel housed a large antebellum slave exchange. As free men of color, the men of the Tribune had witnessed the horror and degradation of the city's many slave pens and auction blocks, where over the years over 100,000 souls were stored, assigned a price, and sold as living property.

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You are standing in front of the L’Union and the New Orleans Tribune building, the birthplace of civil rights history in the Crescent City. Here, surrounded by the howling madness of the Civil War, these two radical journals condemned slavery and fought for the rights of all of African descent. The black community rallied around the Tribune and organized one of the most important freedom movements in American history. The Tribune’s crusade led to black enfranchisement, integrated public schools, the creation of a groundbreaking state constitution with strong equal rights provisions, and the election of many black state representatives.

The New Orleans Tribune (la Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans) proclaimed itself an “organ of the oppressed” and defiantly vowed to “spare no means at our command” to promote equality for all people of African descent. [1] Bravely challenging the very foundations of white supremacy, the Tribune was in the vanguard of a monumental struggle for racial democracy. 

Both newspapers were founded by Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, a free man of color. L’Union was unleashed in 1862 soon after Union forces seized the city. The New Orleans Tribune debuted on July 21, 1864. Publishing over 1,300 issues in the five years of its existence, the Tribune concentrated on matters of central importance to all of African descent: suffrage; an equitable labor and land system to replace slavery; the condition of the emancipated; the creation of integrated public transportation and school systems; the black military; Union policies of accommodation with planters; Louisiana’s constitutional conventions; local and national elections; Reconstruction politics and legislation; and much more. 

The Tribune arose from les gens de couleur libres, the community of free people of color who lived in the Vieux Carré and the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny. Racially mixed, French-speaking, and Catholic, this prosperous, politically astute and assertive group was one of the largest of its kind in the United States. [2] Of African, Caribbean, European and First Nations ancestries, free people of color resulted from unlawful but tolerated inter-racial relationships during the colonial and antebellum periods. Their very existence contradicted the foundational idea of slave society, that racial inferiority was part of the natural order. Moreover, white elites worried that free people of color offered the enslaved hope for their own liberation.

The Tribune was bilingual from the start, two pages in English and two in French. The English-language section was a strategic effort to expand the journal’s message outside of the francophone community of free people of color that had been served by the newspaper’s predecessor, L’Union. That new audience grew to include those who had been enslaved, with whom the Tribune identified. “They are of us, and we love them as we do ourselves. We are the organ of the oppressed, without distinction.” [3]

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Now an empty lot and the site of two pop-up restaurants, this corner was once the location of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church. It was here, on Sunday, October 17, that the cartoonist George Joseph Herriman was baptized by Father Antoine Borias. George Herriman Sr. served as his grandson’s godfather, while young Herriman’s godmother was Eliza Ebel, his mother’s mother.

It’s not known why Herriman’s parents chose to bring their son to Sacred Heart instead of the customary St. Augustine, but Borias soon departed the parish for Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where he continued to try to find ways to serve and educate Black Catholics until his death in 1900.

George and Clara Herriman remained practicing Catholics following the family’s move to California in 1890. They educated their children in Catholic schools and observed the sacraments; crosses adorn their tombstones at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. The cartoonist George Herriman’s own spiritual beliefs were clearly affected by his time among Native Americans in the Arizona and Utah desert, and in his will he would stipulate that his ashes should be scattered over Monument Valley. Yet themes of good and evil, and sin and redemption, would frequently enter into his comics, reflecting his years attending Catholic services in New Orleans, as well as his Catholic education at St. Vincent’s College in Los Angeles.

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At the former intersection of Exchange Alley and St. Louis Street — now a parking gate for the Louisiana Supreme Court — once stood the meeting place for Fraternité No. 20, a racially integrated Masonic lodge that included George Herriman’s grandfather and father among its members.

“In spite of all the old prejudices, the Scotch Rite Masons have taken the initiative in unfurling the banner of fraternity and equality, under whose glorious folds so much good may be accomplished,” reported the New Orleans Tribune on June 23, 1867. Lodge minutes show that on July 9, George Herriman Sr. (the cartoonist’s grandfather) joined, and became an active member on the finance and charity committees. On January 15, 1873, he introduced his son, George Herriman Jr. (the cartoonist’s father), as a member. In the induction ceremony, the younger Herriman was praised for traits of courage, prudence, and modesty.

Meeting on St. Louis street, the members of Fraternité No. 20 would have been well aware that they were sitting near a vivid reminder of these old prejudices. Just across the street was the city’s most notorious site for the sale and purchase of enslaved people: the auction block at the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, at the location of the current Omni Royal Orleans Hotel.

“Society is now being reorganized among us, upon the true principle of freedom, and, to do this great work, we need harmony and friendship, for we want to build up an edifice that will stand,” wrote the Tribune in 1867. Yet the edifice did not survive long after that. The lodge appeared to disband in 1873, and the building where Fraternité No. 20 meetings took place probably fell in 1903, demolished with the rest of the block to make way for the Louisiana Supreme Court Building.

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There is no way of knowing if young George Herriman ever accompanied his parents to the historic Café du Monde Coffee Stand, which was established in the New Orleans French Market in 1862, eighteen years before Herriman’s birth. What is certain, however, is that the restaurant’s signature cafe au lait would become one of Herriman’s favorite metaphors for describing the complexities of race and social identity.

Growing up in a mixed-race family in 1880s New Orleans, young Herriman would have experienced the very real consequences of having an identity that shifted legally and culturally over the years. Whether called “Creole,” “Free People of Color,” “Mulatto,” or “Negro,” the Herrimans learned what it was like to see hard-earned rights disappear with each new designation. So perhaps it is no surprise that as a cartoonist, Herriman explored the shifting nature of reality, creating desert backgrounds that changed from panel to panel, and inventing a protagonist who changed color frequently, and gender constantly.

Herriman used many clever visual metaphors to convey these ideas. Krazy Kat’s crooked tail might stand in for hair, which was often considered a tell-tale sign of a person’s ethnicity. A beauty parlor might be visited to lighten complexion, demonstrating how shades of color could imply greater or lesser worth. But it was in strips about coffee that Herriman found one of his most ingenious ways to discuss meaning and identity. In a 1919 “Krazy Kat” comic, Krazy asks why coffee is called cafe au lait when it has milk. “Aint my shoes still shoes when I put my foots in them?” Krazy asks. And in a 1931 strip that might be interpreted as a subtle commentary on racial passing, Ignatz Mouse is serving a customer and asks Krazy, who is working in the kitchen, for a black coffee. Krazy passes it through the window. Scowling at the cup, Ignatz says, “Hey, this isn’t black coffee!” “Sure it is,” replies Krazy. “Look unda the milk.”

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Here — near the corner of Royal Street and Esplanade Avenue — a white riverboat captain named Stephen Herriman, originally from Long Island, made his home from 1843 until his death in 1854.

Stephen Herriman’s house is no longer standing. It possibly was torn down by businessman John Gauche when he purchased property at this corner in 1856, or it might have been destroyed during an 1893 fire. (A marker for the Gauche House can be seen around the corner at 1315 Royal Street.) Whatever his building’s ultimate fate, Herriman will not go down in history for his work as a captain, for his fundraising activity with his Masonic lodge during an 1853 yellow fever epidemic, nor for his amassing of sizable wealth — there were at least ten enslaved people in his house. What is most memorable about Stephen Herriman — and what makes the location of this house so remarkable — is his brief encounter with a Free Woman of Color named Justine Olivier.

Little is known of Stephen Herriman’s experiences with Olivier. No civil records tell of their union. Their connection would be lost to time if the New Orleans Archdiocese didn’t keep such comprehensive records, for Herriman and Olivier are identified as parents to George Herriman Sr. — the cartoonist’s grandfather — in numerous documents, including the Church’s records of Herriman’s 1846 wedding to Louisa Eckel.

Olivier’s first child with Stephen Herriman appears to have been Frederic Herriman, born in 1818; George Herriman Sr. arrived two years later. Within a few years of these births, Stephen Herriman would marry Janett Spencer, a white woman also from New York. At around the same time, Justine Olivier would begin a lifelong relationship with the son of a French tinsmith named Joseph Alexandre Chesse, and raise her two Herriman sons in the Chessé family.

What is perhaps most remarkable about this location is how it illustrates the close proximity of all members of these families. A matter of a few city blocks separated the Herriman and Chessé families. What did they know about each other? What contact was kept through the years? Did Stephen Herriman watch his two sons with Justine Oliver grow to manhood, and did he participate in their lives? Those questions will likely never be answered.

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This peach-colored commercial building is a landmark of both journalism and the struggle for civil rights in 19th Century New Orleans. Here were the original offices of the New Orleans Tribune, first Black-owned daily newspaper in the United States and a fierce champion for Black rights during and after the Civil War.

Running the Tribune were its founder Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, his brother Jean Baptiste Roudanez, and the newspaper’s editor Paul Trèvigne, all free people of color; they would be joined by the Belgian Jean-Charles Houzeau, who would publish a memoir of his time at the Tribune. Emerging from the French-language L’Union, which launched in 1862 as the first Black-owned newspaper of the South, the bi-lingual Tribune debuted as a daily in 1864. It enjoyed a run of more than a thousand issues before it closed in 1869.

The leaders of the Tribune were close to the Herriman family. Among the political actions promoted by L’Union was a petition to Abraham Lincoln demanding voting rights, which was signed by one thousand free men of color, including George Herriman’s father and grandfather. Jean Baptiste Roudanez along with Arnold Bertonneau — a friend of the Herrimans’ — directly presented the petition to Lincoln.

The Herriman & Chessé tailor shop on Royal Street stood just blocks from the Tribune office, and the two institutions were even closer to each other when the Tribune moved to 122-124 Exchange Alley. Not surprisingly, the Herrimans show up frequently in the Tribune’s pages. An advertisement for an 1865 lecture by Madam Louise De Mortie — a free Black from Boston who had moved to New Orleans to assist the Colored Orphans Home — included the Herriman & Chessé shop among the establishments that were selling tickets. George Herriman Sr.’s participation from everything to the Fraternité 20 lodge to Republican party meetings was noted in the pages of the Tribune. And when the cartoonist’s great-grandmother Justine Olivier perished in a steamboat accident in 1866, the Tribune printed the sad news on its front page, noting that Olivier was a “well-known and universally respected lady.”

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There are three buildings still standing in New Orleans where it is most likely young George Herriman spent his childhood days: St. Augustine Church, the site of the Herriman & Chessé tailor shop, and this handsomely restored Creole cottage on the corner of Burgundy and Kerlerac streets (or, during Herriman’s time, the corner of Craps and History). Here was the Chessé family home, just blocks from the Herriman home on Villere street.

More than cousins, the Herrimans and Chessés might best be considered one family. Justine Olivier raised her two Herriman sons in the Chessé family, and throughout their time in New Orleans, the Herrimans and Chessés worked together, worshipped together and — though there is no record of it — surely socialized together. Extended family members, including the Esnards, intermarried, deepening the family ties.

As with the Herrimans, members of the Chessé family moved from New Orleans where they would self-identify, or “pass,” as white. These include Ralph Chessé, who went on to become an accomplished painter and puppeteer. During his remarkable career, Ralph worked with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project, staging marionette shows including an all-puppet adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s drama The Emperor Jones. (Although not identifying as Black, in this and other works, Chessé explored racial themes in his work.) Other members of the Chessé family include Ralph’s son Bruce Chessé, also a puppeteer, and film editor Matt Chessé. Cousins to the Herrimans and Chessés include the writer Norman Rush, former commander of Joint Task Force Katrina Lt. General Russel L. Honoré (ret.), and the various members of New Orleans’ musical Boutté family. In 2018, singer John Boutté honored his ties to the Herrimans and Chessés by voicing the part of Krazy Kat in the song “Happy Land,” recorded with New Orleans’ Panorama Jazz Band.

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George Joseph Herriman’s grandfather had been working as a tailor since at least 1847, when he was twenty-seven years old, and he had been in business with his half-brother Alexander Laurent Chessé since at least 1850. In 1854, shortly following the death of each of their fathers, Herriman and Chessé opened a tailor shop at this location on busy Royal Street, and it remained a productive business for the next thirty years.

The Herriman & Chessé tailor shop occupied the ground floor of the three-story building at 318 Royal Street. Here, they sold clothing made from fabrics that they would purchase themselves on trips to France. There were two counters for serving customers, along with two glass display cases, and a large cedar chest. In addition to purchasing fine clothing, customers might also pick up tickets to political rallies as well as news of the latest political and cultural activities.

In the top floor of the building was an upscale apartment that brought some unwelcome notoriety to the building in 1879, when a man named William Beasley was seen throwing a woman named Missouri Jane Hebert from the gallery; he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.

Despite this interruption, work at the tailor shop proceeded until 1887, when George Herriman Sr. brought his son into the business, renaming it Herriman & Son. The shop moved to 118 Customhouse Street, where father and son worked together for three years, until George Herriman Jr. moved his family to California, never to return. In Los Angeles, George Herriman Jr. continued to work as a tailor in a series of shops and small factories, and became active in the Tailors’ Union No. 81.

There are only a few references to the tailor profession in George Herriman’s comics. When asked about his childhood, Herriman would usually say he was the son of a baker. He never explained why.

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Devout Catholics and energetic members of a radical integrated Masonic lodge, the Herrimans also were regular participants in a remarkable series of seances that were led by their friend, neighbor, and fellow lodge-member, Henry Louis Rey. Born into a prominent Free People of Color family, Rey was a bookbinder, a Civil War captain, and during Reconstruction served both in the Louisiana House of Representatives and the newly integrated Orleans Parish School Board. As the hopes of Reconstruction gave way to the bitter realities of Jim Crow, Rey conducted seances at a number of locations in which members were encouraged by the spirit world to “en avant,” or “keep going.” Spirits might be historic or spiritual figures such as Ben Franklin or Jesus Christ, or they might be deceased family members, including George Herriman Sr.’s brother, Frederic Herriman. Seances were conducted in the evening, in a darkened, quiet room, according to historian Melissa Dagget. A medium would receive and record the spirit’s words to the gathered.

Cartoonist George Herriman’s grandfather and father both participated in “le circle harmonique,” which lasted from the 1850s through the 1870s. Locations included Henry Louis Rey’s house on Villere street, just a few houses down from the Herrimans’ home. Most of the seances, however, took place in Joseph Lavigne’s cigar shop at 162 Esplanade Avenue (today 1140 Esplanade Avenue). According to Dagget’s research, Lavigne and Rey were childhood friends and served together during the Civil War, and both were active in public education.

Lavigne died in 1877. Due to increased political and work pressures, the seances came to an end. By then, the mood had changed. Writes Dagget: “During the last two years of the registers, the zealous calls for political action and the euphoria over an anticipated change in the racial structure in Louisiana were replaced with melancholy communications that urged Rey to be patient and to be content with the present.” Rey’s final message from beyond came on November 24, 1877. In a time of diminishing fortunes, the spirit reminded Rey that “we are with you for an eternity.”

The cartoonist George Herriman was born three years later. It’s not known if he was aware of his father and grandfather’s participation in the seances. Years later, however, he would include seances and spirits in his comics, especially during an increased wave of spiritualism in the United States following World War One.

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The first historical record of George Herriman Sr. — the cartoonist George Herriman’s grandfather — is the New Orleans Archdiocese’s confirmation records for St. Louis Cathedral on March 1, 1836. Among those confirmed that day was a young “George Herimand,” who was brought to the Cathedral with his half-sister, Louise Chessé, for the sacrament. Performing the sacrament was Antoine Blanc, who in 1850 would become the first archbishop of New Orleans Archdiocese.

Among the most recognizable buildings in New Orleans, the current St. Louis Cathedral sits on a site that was designated for a place of worship shortly after the founding of New Orleans. An early church was destroyed (along with much of the French Quarter) in a 1788 fire. Herriman was confirmed in the third church on this site, which in 1850 was rebuilt into the current cathedral.

More than the outer structure of St. Louis Cathedral would change over the years. At the time of Herriman’s confirmation, the congregation was racially integrated, to the surprise of many visitors. “Never had I seen such a mixture of conditions and colors … white children and black, with every shade between, knelt side by side,” reported one visitor, as quoted in James B. Bennett’s book Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans. Just as the structure of the church changed, so too did the fortunes of African Americans within its walls. By the end of the century, black Catholics were required to sit on newly installed boards against the cathedral’s back and side walls.

George Herriman Sr. remained a practicing Catholic throughout his life, and following his death in 1907 was entombed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 on Esplanade Avenue.

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The house where George Herriman was born no longer stands; in its place is a gate leading into a school parking lot. But it was here that, on August 22, 1880, George Joseph Herriman was born into a mixed-race, middle- to upper-class family headed by Clara Herriman and George Herriman Jr.

The Tremé neighborhood was, from its inception, a mixed neighborhood, with early lots purchased by Free People of Color such as the Herrimans and their cousins, the Chessés, along with immigrant families from France, Spain and other countries. Here, the Herrimans labored to build a home during decades of cultural and political upheaval.

It’s likely Herriman would have remembered his early years as a time of comfort and security, in a home and neighborhood filled with doting relatives. Also living in his house were his aunt and uncle, Alice and Ralph Hecaud, a musician and piano tuner. (This is the same family as Eulalie Hecaud, the godmother to Jelly Roll Morton.) The Hecauds brought another baby boy into the household just six months after Herriman’s birth. The next year, on July 13, 1882, Herriman’s brother, Henry Walter Herriman, was born. Next door resided Herriman’s grandparents with his aunt Josephine.

“It was a strange, mysterious, unpredictable world,” Herriman’s cousin Ralph Chessé would recall. “There were so many old people all round — people telling me what to do and what not to do; what to say and what not to say; where to go and where not to go. ‘Ne touche pas’ was the oft-repeated command.”

Although the homes on the Herrimans’ side of Villere Street no longer stand, the surviving buildings across the street give a good sense of the neighborhood at the time of Herriman’s birth. These include the former home of Herriman family friend Henry Louis Rey at 1447 N. Villere Street, and the restored Milné Estate at 1423 N. Villere Street, both buildings estimated to date from the 1860s.

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On August 6, 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter from 7 Bellville Court, Algiers, Louisiana, to Langston Hughes in which she writes "I have landed in the kingdom of Marie Laveau and expect to wear her crown someday” (Kaplan, 124). In Algiers, Hurston rented “a 3 room house in a splendid neighborhood from the point of view of collecting material” (Kaplan, 124). At this time, according to Mona Lisa Saloy, folklorist at Dillard University, “Algiers was a bedroom community largely populated by the waiters, waitresses, educators, and especially musicians, merchant seaman, sailors, and railroad folk who could not afford to live in downtown New Orleans.”

Most of the details about Hurston’s stay in Belleville Court, then the heart of the black community, comes from an interview in 2009 with Mrs. Naomi [Willis] Grooms, who was 12 years old when Hurston came to live in Algiers (Saloy). According to Mrs. Grooms, who was 92 at the time of the interview, “the house Hurston rented, and indeed all of Belleville Court, was owned by a "well-established Black land owner, a Mr. Joubert from the area’” (Grooms quoted in Saloy).

Although Hurston was friendly with all the children, she chose young Naomi to be her helper, sending the girl on errands to the Black-owned corner store on Belleville and Lemarc Streets, called Joe Lewis, “for foodstuffs (lots of bread, beans and rice).” Among her other tasks were “scrubbing the wide plank floors at Zora's house... and keeping the entire house clean.” Naomi’s was “to take no money from the nice educated lady who needed to research and write most of all” (Grooms quoted in Saloy). Hurston was welcomed to the neighborhood, and Grooms remembers that she “wrote furiously . . . pounding relentlessly on that typewriter; she was a sight working at home and writing day and night” (quoted in Saloy). Even so, she was very friendly and spent time chatting on porches, interacting with neighbors and children, “sharing an iced tea on occasion, passing the time while watching the night sky some evenings” (Grooms quoted in Saloy).

In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston went back and forth across the Mississippi from New Orleans to Algiers. She also traveled to Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi, gathering the material, the stories that would become her book, Mules and Men (1935), which captures the authentic voices and documents the lives, culture, and experiences of the people she encountered (Saloy). The magnitude of this effort cannot be minimized; it is a testimony to Hurston’s commitment and ethnographic skills and a gift to be appreciated by the generations.

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In January of 1949, a maroon Hudson sedan pulled up to the house at 509 Wagner Street in Algiers, Louisiana. The driver was Neal Cassady, and the passengers included Jack Kerouac, Al Hinkle, and LuAnne Henderson. They drove nonstop from New York to visit William S. Burroughs, who had bought the house in August 1948 for $3500 and lived with his common-law wife Joan Vollmer, her six-year old daughter Julie, and the couple’s two-year old son Billy. Hinkle’s newlywed wife Helen was also staying there. The visit, which lasted a few days, would become renowned as an episode in Kerouac’s iconic Beat Generation novel On The Road (1957).

Part of the fictionalized, autobiographical second journey chronicled in the novel, the arrival at Wagner Street to visit Burroughs (who is called Old Bull Lee) is narrated by Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise: “We went to Old Bull Lee’s house outside town near the river levee. It was on a road that ran across a swampy field. The house was a dilapidated old heap with sagging porches running around and weeping willows in the yard; the grass was a yard high, old fences leaned, old barns collapsed.” Burroughs was addicted to heroin and not particularly engaged in the local scene, other than, as Sal explains: “slipping along the streets with shady characters and haunting connection bars.” The travelers are excited to check out the New Orleans jazz scene, but Burroughs tells them they cannot because the city is segregated. They spend a day across the river on Canal Street, and Burroughs drives Kerouac to “go play the horses over to the bookie parlor in Graetna” [sic]. Most of the time, however, they hang out at Wagner Street, where Burroughs reads, philosophizes, shoots his air pistol, sets up a knife-throwing target, and encourages Kerouac to try out the “orgone accumulator,” a layered wood and metal box based on the theories of Wilhelm Reich that a man can sit inside to absorb “atmospheric atoms of the life-principle,” which he had constructed in the back yard. Burroughs tries to persuade Kerouac to remain in New Orleans and abandon what he sees as Cassady’s pointless cross-country traveling, but Kerouac, Cassady, and Henderson head back on the road. 509 Wagner Street was sold by the end of July 1949, but Burroughs’ time there also figured in his first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953), published under the pseudonym William Lee and aimed at the pulp fiction market.

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William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897, and frequently used his familiar Southern surroundings as the setting for many of his works. Faulkner was an American novelist and poet that became well-known for his works that included The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, his 1931 novel Sanctuary, and his many poems. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1955 and 1963, and the National Book Award for Fiction in both 1951 and 1955. Many of his novels were set in the American South and centered around themes of man’s capacity for evil, the decline of the South, nature, and primitivism vs. civilization.

Upon arriving in New Orleans in 1924, Faulkner spent the beginning of his stay with Sherwood Anderson. Shortly after, Faulkner moved into the first floor of the 624 Pirate’s Alley building with the famous artist and silver designer William Spratling. Although only living in New Orleans for a short six months in 1925, William Faulkner’s work from then on was inspired by and contained elements of the New Orleans vibe.

It was in his first-floor apartment – located behind the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square – that William Faulkner began working on the draft of his first novel Soldiers’ Pay in 1925, that would then be published in 1926. It was also here that Faulkner and William Spratling produced a book called Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, that satirized Miguel Covarrubias' The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans. During his stay, Faulkner published multiple essays for the local magazine The Double Dealer, as well as character sketches for the Times-Picayune.

In 1926, Faulkner left New Orleans for Paris and resided at Le Grand Hôtel des Principautés Unies for some months. Faulkner later returned to New Orleans and began using the advice that he received from Sherwood Anderson to write about the places that Faulkner knew – places such as his native Mississippi and New Orleans. Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, The Wild Palms, and Absalom! Absalom! were all inspired by the South, especially New Orleans and various places in Mississippi.

The 624 Pirate’s Alley building was purchased and established as Faulkner House Books in 1990 by attorney Joseph J. DeSalvo and Rosemary James. The bookstore houses literary works of Southern writers such as Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, and Eudora Welty, as well as holding rare editions of fine literature. The Pirate Alley’s Faulkner Society – which is a place for men and women to volunteer and organize events that focus on writing and literary programming for readers and writers – was established in 1990 by Faulkner scholar W. Kenneth Holditch, James, and DeSalvo. Faulkner House Books has frequented news media and traveling blogs over the years, as well as being dubbed as National Literary Landmark.

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Declared a national literary landmark by the Friends of the Library Association in 1999, Hotel Monteleone opened in 1886 when a Sicilian-born cobbler named Antonio Monteleone purchased the Commercial Hotel, a 64-room hotel located on the corner of Royal and Iberville streets. In the late nineteenth century, Royal Street was the commercial and banking center of New Orleans, and the newly renamed Hotel Monteleone was an instant success with visitors to the city.

The hotel grew so quickly that in 1908 Monteleone had to rebuild and expand the hotel, for a cost of $260,000. Since its opening, the Monteleone has expanded five times, including the 1954 expansions to its lounges and the opening of the legendary Carousel Bar.

Through the years, the Carousel Bar has attracted visitors and locals alike, including many noted writers. In fact, Hotel Monteleone serves as the backdrop in over 173 stories and novels. Famous writers who stayed at the Monteleone include William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Lyle Saxon, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Anne Rice. Capote often boasted that he was born in the Monteleone. The truth is that his parents were guests when his mother went into labor. They made it to Touro Hospital in time.

However, Hotel Monteleone was not always a site of happy times in the literary world. In 1942, New Orleans born author and Federal Writers’ Project employee Innis Patterson Truman jumped to her death from the hotel’s twelfth floor. Lyle Saxon described her death in a letter.

Just a few famous examples of works that include the hotel or Carousel Bar as a background include Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending, Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere, Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, Richard Ford’s A Piece of My Heart, Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green, Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography; Erle Stanley Gardner’s Owls Don’t Blink (written under the pen name A.A. Fair), Ernest Hemingway’s “Night Before Battle” and Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Voice of the Seven Sparrows. Guests can lodge in suites named after famous authors such as Capote, Hemingway, and Williams.

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Tennessee Williams was no stranger to New Orleans. Some of his most famous works, including A Streetcar Named Desire, are set in the city. Although Williams spent decades living on and off in rental spaces, 1014 Dumaine Street is the first home he owned in New Orleans. Purchased in 1962, the building was not always what one would imagine as the home of a world-renowned writer. Articles in the Times-Picayune ranging from 1927 through 1959 painted the address as less than desirable. One 1952 Times-Picayune article even detailed the filing of a petition in Civic District Court by the city to get the Dumaine building either repaired or demolished, calling it “dangerously deteriorated.” Many of the newspaper’s other mentions of the site prior to the 1960s portrayed it as the home for various criminals. These residents’ reported crimes varied in severity. While some infractions were as minor as a truck driver not having a chauffeur’s license and a woman possessing “lottery paraphernalia,” others were as severe as gun theft, auto theft, and assault. A 1958 Times-Picayune article even mentioned the shooting of an 18-year-old man in front of the building. However, the immediate neighborhood’s condition appeared to change as the 1950s became the 1960s. In July 1960, a Times-Picayune apartment listing at 1014 Dumaine Street boasted “luxury apartments” in a “magnificent building just recently restored.” A 1961 Times-Picayune article also featured 1014 Dumaine Street among properties in the French Quarter that underwent notable restorations and renovations. The article’s mention of rising property values, related to restoration projects throughout the French Quarter, implied a decline in affordability for renters in the Vieux Carre. In 1962, just four years after the shooting on Dumaine Street, Tennessee Williams purchased the property at 1014 Dumaine, which likely retained little of its former dilapidation. However, Williams did not move into the building’s front, second floor apartment until 1972, when Don Lee Keith claims that some “bothersome” tenants moved out. Once moved in, Williams used the space as his base of operations in New Orleans for the remainder of his life. Friends, locals, and tourists can recall instances when they stumbled into Williams at numerous French Quarter bars and restaurants. Recalling Williams’ New Orleans visits during this time, one of Williams’ former Dumaine Street tenants, Dr. Lawrence Hill, recalled a moment of excitement he shared with the writer: “One morning he came down and knocked on my door, all excited … Esquire magazine had agreed to buy a short story from him. Here he was, the most famous playwright in the country, and he was acting like he’d made his first sale. It was the most down-to-earth I’d seen him.” "He left $10 million when he died," Cynthia Ratcliffe, co-owner of Heritage Tours, said. "But [shortly before] his death, he could still be seen washing and folding his own socks in there,” she added, referring to a laundromat at the corner of Burgundy and Dumaine.

W. Kenneth Holditch’s recollection of a January 1979 encounter with Williams described the author’s frustrations with the changing nature of the French Quarter: “He commented on what he saw as the unpleasant changes to the Quarter that had been occurring over the past decade or more, including the increasing sleaziness of Bourbon Street, the loss of permanent residences to businesses, and the influx of tourists that made walking through the streets of some areas increasingly difficult. However, changing conditions in the neighborhood did not deter Williams from staying in his French Quarter home. In fact, a newspaper article published a few years after he died claimed Williams was seen on the Dumaine Street’s second floor balcony just a few weeks prior to his death in New York City in 1983."

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