Bank's Arcade

One writer remembered the glass-roofed arcade as a sales floor. In an 1839 recollection quoted in the account of the New Orleans slave market, Bank's Arcade was the city's main auction mart. The same account says auctions also took place in the two grand hotels and other public rooms, and that by the 1850s the trade had its own district of pens and offices. It adds that by 1827, in Frederic Bancroft's reckoning, New Orleans was the chief center of the lower South's trade. The people sold there are not named in that account.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.4 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 — 0.5 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 — 0.6 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 — 0.7 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 — 0.2 mi
• America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall — 0.2 mi
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — 0.3 mi
• New Orleans Slave Depot — 0.3 mi