Hurricane Katrina Memorial

Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane, and by August 31 about 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded. Most residents left after the city's first mandatory evacuation order on August 28, and those who stayed were often people without cars or money. About 20,000 people sheltered in the Superdome, and as many as 20,000 gathered at the Convention Center, which had no food, water or medical care. Eight people died at Charity Hospital. Counts of the dead vary, with one preliminary state toll at 1,464. About 175,000 Black residents left within a year.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.4 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 Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.6 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.6 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 — 0.6 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.

More markers nearby

• The Rault Center High-Rise Fire of 1972 — steps away
• The Pythian Temple — steps away
• Jazz (Loyola Avenue) — steps away
• Molly Marine — steps away