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Duncan Plaza
This past July, if you happened to be downtown near the Superdome and New Orleans City Hall, you might have seen something unexpected: in the public park known as Duncan Plaza, there were students…
McDonogh No. 5
In 2020, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided funding to the Recovery School District (RSD) authorizing the renovation of Martin Berhman Elementary School under the Robert T. Stafford…
The Old Ursuline Convent
In 2011, Shannon Lee Dawdy, an archaeologist and professor with the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology, conducted an excavation with students and volunteers at the site of the Ursuline…
Yellow Fever Hospital, Excavations at Thurgood Marshall School
In 2017, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded the repairs to Thurgood Marshall School caused by the Hurricane Katrina levee breaches. The site had been a school for over one hundred…
Development on Bayou Road: McDonogh (Bricolage Academy) Senior High School
John McDonogh Senior High School (now Bricolage Academy) suffered damages from Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that funded the repairs also funded archaeological…
Immigrant Households in Mid-City: Excavations from Albert Wicker Elementary School
Albert Wicker Elementary School had been located on Bienville Street in Mid-City 1971. Due to the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the school was damaged to the extent that the Orleans Parish School…
Archaeological Excavations at Spanish Fort
At the junction of Lake Pontchartrain and Bayou St. John, swells of land, ruins of brick, and clusters of live oak trees mark the spot that today is called “Fort St. John.” Otherwise known as “Spanish…
Saint Louis Cathedral
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…
Bridge City Gumbo Festival: A Celebration of Food and Community
Once a year, the small community of Bridge City, Louisiana, welcomes locals and visitors to the Bridge City Gumbo Festival. Since the early 1970s, the festival has taken place on the second full…
Maison: Sierra Green Entertains The Entertainer
Frenchmen denizens are known for holding up their homegrown heroes rather than kowtowing to celebrity. (Think Coco Robicheaux, Uncle Lionel, Little Freddie King…) But that doesn’t mean that an…
Bicycle Michael’s: Post-Katrina Chair-Racing on a Freshly-Paved Street
Bicycle Michael’s is the oldest bike shop in New Orleans. As soon as Michael Ferrand opened it--on Royal Street, in 1983--his rent was inflated in anticipation of the 1984 World’s Fair. He was forced…
The Christopher Inn: Soaked After the Second-Line
Sometimes referred to as the Patron Saint of Frenchmen Street and local style icon “Uncle” Lionel Batiste was a patriarch of the famed Treme Brass Band and one of the so-called “Benchmen of…
30/90, Cafe Negril, Spotted Cat: Hannah’s Three-Venue Runaround
In many places where the music industry thrives, bands and businesses are competitive, proprietary, or just plain isolated from one another. Frenchmen Street, on the other hand, has traditionally…
The Vacant Lot: Ashes to Oranges
Coors Underground (or is it Chords Underground? ....Cords?) was an old Frenchmen Street venue that was destroyed in a violent explosion in the mid-70s. It’s exceedingly hard to find any information…
d.b.a.: Margie Perez gets a Wonderful Surprise
Anything can happen on Frenchmen St. when the stars align! Margie Perez recounts a magic night on Frenchmen, capturing a moment in time: shortly after Hurricane Katrina, before smart phones, and…
The Rooftop of Café Brasil: Adé Salgado Surveys The New Millennium
Famed coffeeshop-turned-music-incubator Café Brasil was a fixture on the Frenchmen Street scene between its opening in 1985 and its closure in 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina. Although the…
The Spotted Cat: Trombone Battle Of The Century
Young musicians on Frenchmen Street have unique opportunities to be inspired by their musical heroes on an up close and personal level. Jeremy Phipps, of the contemporary band People Museum, grew up…
The Bench: The Unofficial Landmark of a Bygone Era
Since the 1970s, Frenchmen has been home to a smorgasbord of music venues that have birthed, incubated, and showcased various facets of the local music scene. We’ve asked hundreds of musicians about…
936 St. Peter Street: A Cottage Industry in the Quarter
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…
Locust Grove Cemeteries No. 1 and 2 and Thomy Lafon School
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.…
Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2
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…
The Gex Pottery Site at the Lafitte Housing Project
In 2009-2010, archaeologists from ESI excavated the remains of a pottery from one of the blocks during the Lafitte Housing Complex renovation along what used to have been the Carondelet “Old Basin”…
Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 1 and Hurricane Katrina Memorial
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…
626 Bourbon Street
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…