Fair Grounds Race Course

Racing here is older than the name. A track on Gentilly Road opened in April 1838, organized by Bernard de Marigny, Julius Branch and Henry Tayloe, as the Louisiana Race Course. It reopened as the Union in 1852, closed in 1857, and came back as the Creole in 1859. It became the Fair Grounds in 1863, and racing continued through the Civil War. Later chapters include a ban on racing from 1908 to 1915, a grandstand fire in 1919, a seven-alarm blaze in 1993, a Katrina closure of more than a year, and slot machines in 2008.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 1.6 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.7 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 — 2.0 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Pitot House — 0.7 mi
• The Old Portage — 0.7 mi
• Fannie C. Williams / Valena C. Jones Elementary School — 0.9 mi
• Allard Plantation — 0.9 mi