Lafayette Square

Charles Laveau Trudeau, the Spanish surveyor general, designed the square in 1788 for Faubourg Sainte-Marie. First Presbyterian Church filled much of its western side from 1834 to 1938 with the city's tallest steeple, and during the Union occupation General Benjamin Butler had its bell rung as a curfew. Gallier Hall, the former City Hall, faces the square on St. Charles Avenue. Statues of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Clay stand here, and a statue of John McDonogh, a slaveholder whose will funded city schools, was removed in July 2020. Katrina wrecked the trees, and a conservancy formed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• The Cabildo — 0.8 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.8 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

• Kossuth — steps away
• Enrique Alférez — steps away
• Bank's Arcade — 0.2 mi
• Bienville's Plantation — 0.3 mi