Italian Hall

After 1912 the Italian Hall Association owned this building, and the Italian Chamber of Commerce spent about eight years rebuilding and enlarging it, adding a dance hall on the upper floors. It served as headquarters for roughly twenty-seven Italian benevolent societies, among them Sicilian and Albanian-Sicilian communities that kept their own bands. In the mid-1920s the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played dances here, and Irving Fazola and the bands of Punch Miller and Chris Kelly also performed. The 1970s turned the hall into apartments and the 1990s into condominiums.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 0.4 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.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 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 — 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.6 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.

More markers nearby

• Carmelite Monastery — steps away
• Saint Augustine Church, New Orleans — steps away
• Tomb of the Unknown Slave — steps away
• Frances Benjamin Johnston House — 0.2 mi