Canal Street Under French and Spanish Rule (1718-1803)

The street was named for a canal that was planned and never dug, and its median became the "neutral ground," a name tied to the line between the Creole and American communities. Judah Touro paid for the street's first beautification. Maison Blanche, D. H. Holmes, Godchaux's, Gus Mayer, Labiche's, Kreeger's and Krauss anchored the main shopping district for more than a century, and its primacy faded in the late 1960s. Canal Place's shops opened in 1983. The street has been called America's widest main street.

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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.4 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.
• 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

• 127-129 Carondelet Street — steps away
• Immaculate Conception Church (Jesuits') — steps away
• New Orleans Slave Depot — steps away
• America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall — steps away