17th Street Canal Floodwall

The canal took its name from a planned street beside the spur dug in 1858 to drain the swamp behind Carrollton, and it became the boundary between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. On August 29, 2005, about 6:30 a.m., a section of the east wall split open near Bellaire Drive while the water stood about five feet below its top, and the gap grew to nearly 450 feet. Investigators found faulty design: the steel sheet pilings were driven about 17 feet deep, not the 31 to 46 feet needed. Thirty-one victims were recovered from the flooded blocks.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 5.0 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 5.0 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 5.3 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 5.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• New Basin Canal — 0.8 mi
• Lakefront "Seawall" — 0.8 mi
• Lake Pontchartrain — 1.4 mi
• Fort St. John (Spanish Fort) — 2.2 mi