Audubon Park History

Both armies used the ground during the Civil War, and it served as a staging area for Buffalo Soldiers. After the city annexed it in 1870, Foucher's widow sold the land in 1871 to two developers, Bloomer and Southworth, who sold the riverside part to the city for a park and the rest to investors who gained from the park's value. The 1884 Cotton Centennial left an iron ore rock from the Alabama exhibit that locals mistake for a meteorite, and the 1915 hurricane destroyed Horticultural Hall. A 2002 Par 3 conversion of the golf course upset non-golfers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.6 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 4.1 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.3 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 — 4.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Boré Plantation - Audubon Park — 0.3 mi
• The Original Teddy Bear — 0.4 mi
• The Flood of 1927 — 0.4 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 1.0 mi