Congo Square

The square's last century is a story of clearing and naming. An urban renewal project in the early 1960s tore down a large part of central Tremé beside it, and most later analysts judged that a mistake. The park built on the cleared ground was dedicated in April 1980 and given Louis Armstrong's name. The first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival met in what is now the park in 1970. The National Register of Historic Places listed Congo Square in 1993, and 64 Parishes says a historical marker followed in 1997.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.2 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 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.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 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

• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away
• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• First Recording Studio of Cosimo Matassa — steps away