LaRocca Residence

Dominic James LaRocca was born on April 11, 1889, in New Orleans to Sicilian immigrant parents, and his father hoped he would enter a more prestigious profession. He secretly taught himself cornet, worked as an electrician and was a regular in Papa Jack Laine's bands from about 1910 to 1916. In the 1950s he wrote forceful letters claiming sole credit for inventing jazz, which damaged his credibility. After a nervous breakdown in the early 1920s he went into construction, reunited the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1936, and died in New Orleans on February 22, 1961.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 0.6 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 1.9 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 — 2.0 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 — 2.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Goldsmith-Godchaux House — steps away
• Newcomb House — 0.4 mi
• Freret's Folly — 0.5 mi
• E.T. Robinson Mansion — 0.5 mi