Essanee Theater

When the Essanee opened in 1937 it was among the first buildings in town with a form of air conditioning: fans pushed ice-cooled air through underground tunnels and out floor vents. Admission was 25 cents, against 15 elsewhere, for about 500 seats. Black and white patrons had separate entrances, ticket windows, restrooms and seating. After years of neglect, the Iberia Performing Arts League found faint Disney and Warner Bros. murals when crews pressure-washed the walls. It rebuilt the stage and reopened with 200 seats.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.2 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.1 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — steps away
• Wormser's Department Store — steps away