Jazz (Loyola Avenue)

Zulu's first clubhouse stood on Perdido Street at Loyola Avenue, a block from the Pythian Temple. The club's own history says its founders paraded in 1909 as a social club called the Tramps, and it incorporated in 1916. The original Zulus are said to have drawn on a Zulu-themed skit that the vaudeville troupe the Smart Set performed at the Pythian Temple Theater. Louis Armstrong, who grew up near that first clubhouse, reigned as King Zulu in 1949. A parking lot now covers the site of the clubhouse.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.5 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 — 0.7 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 Pythian Temple — steps away
• The Rault Center High-Rise Fire of 1972 — steps away
• Hurricane Katrina Memorial — steps away
• New Orleans Massacre Of 1866 — 0.2 mi