The French Opera House

Charles Boudousquié, who directed the opera company, commissioned the house. Opera stopped when Union forces held New Orleans in 1862, and in 1864 the wife of General Nathaniel Banks gave a Washington's Birthday ball in the hall. The company returned after the war, but by 1913 the house was in receivership. An anonymous buyer, later identified as William Ratcliffe Irby, gave it to Tulane University with money to run it under the tenor Agustarello Affre. Fire destroyed it on the night of December 4, 1919, and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots had been the last opera sung there.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  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 — steps away
  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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.2 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.
• Congo Square — 0.3 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.

More markers nearby

• My Bourbon Home — steps away
• Merieult House — steps away
• Hermann - Grima House — steps away
• Jack Teagarden — steps away