Basin Street

Basin Street took its name from the turning basin of the Carondelet Canal that once lay here. It began as one of the city's finest residential streets, until about 1870, and railroad tracks later ran up its median to a depot near Canal Street. From 1897 the back side faced Storyville, and after the district closed the street was briefly renamed North Saratoga. Spencer Williams published "Basin Street Blues" in 1926, and Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1928 and Miles Davis in 1963. Today statues of Simón Bolívar, Benito Juárez and Francisco Morazán stand in the median.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  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 — 0.3 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 — 0.4 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 — 0.5 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

• From Iberville Housing Development to Bienville Basin — steps away
• Archaeology Finds Our Past — steps away
• Déterrer Storyville — steps away
• Benito Juarez — steps away