LaBranche Buildings

The row is eleven brick buildings, three and a half stories with Greek Revival detail, put up around 1839 and 1840 for the widow of Jean Baptiste LaBranche: eight face St. Peter Street, one faces Royal and two face Cabildo Alley. Their arched ground-floor openings were made for shops. The ground beneath at least one of them was once part of the old city prisons site, which the municipality sold in 1840. The first railings were simple wrought iron, mostly replaced later by cast-iron galleries like those that now make Royal and St. Peter streetscapes famous.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• 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

• Faulkner House — steps away
• David Bannister Morgan — steps away
• Don Bernardo de Galvez — steps away
• The Cabildo — steps away