America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall

William T. Rock was a New York businessman who bought Edison's rights for one state. In June 1896 he paid $2,500 for Louisiana, reportedly because it was the only state left. With Walter Wainwright he ran a four-week outdoor trial at West End Park, then converted a Canal Street storefront. The bill was short, plotless clips, including the 18-second May Irwin Kiss, which religious leaders attacked. The partners reportedly cleared about $2,000 each by October and went home. Later theaters in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh dispute the title, since Vitascope Hall was a conversion, not a purpose-built house.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.3 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.3 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 — 0.4 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Louis André Martinet / Office of L.A. Martinet, The Crusader & Comité Des Citoyens — steps away
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — steps away
• New Orleans Slave Depot — steps away
• Bank's Arcade — 0.2 mi