Bienville Monument

The sculptor Angela Gregory, born in New Orleans in 1903 and trained under Antoine Bourdelle in Paris, spent about five years on the bronze, two of them in France supervising its casting. The Louisiana Purchase Sesquicentennial Commission set it up in April 1955 at Bienville Plaza, near the Union railroad station. A wreath was laid at its base in 1968 for the city's 250th anniversary, and the statue moved to this small park in November 1996. Gregory had earlier carved sculpture for the Criminal District Courts Building and worked on the Baton Rouge capitol panels. She died in 1990.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  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 — steps away
  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 — 0.2 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.
• Congo Square — 0.5 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.

More markers nearby

• L'Union New Orleans Tribune Building — steps away
• Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange — steps away
• Louis J. Dufilho — steps away
• Homesite of Oliver Pollock — steps away