Fort St. John (Spanish Fort)

The ruin is the last layer of a much older place. A shell midden from Marksville culture occupation around 300 CE formed the base for the early fort. The French built a small fort here in 1701, Spain a larger brick one, and the site was decommissioned in 1823. Private developers later made a lakeside resort, billed as the Coney Island of the South, with a casino, hotel, dance pavilions and a scenic railway, where Armand Piron's band played early jazz. A small iron submarine was displayed until 1908, and the city made it a park in 1938.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 4.3 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 — 4.4 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 — 4.6 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 — 4.7 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

• London Avenue Canal Floodwall Breach — 1.4 mi
• Lakefront "Seawall" — 1.8 mi
• New Basin Canal — 1.8 mi
• Beatles Only Concert Performance in Louisiana — 2.4 mi