Lower Pontalba Building

The Pontalba buildings carry the first recorded use of cast-iron galleries in New Orleans, a form that became the most prominent feature of the city's residential architecture. They cost over $300,000; the upper building went up in 1850 and the lower in 1851. The claim that they hold the oldest continuously rented apartments in the country is disputed: historian Christina Vella says they were built as row houses and converted to apartments in the 1930s. William Ratcliffe Irby bought the lower building and bequeathed it to the Louisiana State Museum. Both are National Historic Landmarks, designated May 30, 1974.

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 — 0.3 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 — 0.4 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.

More markers nearby

• The Steamer New Orleans — steps away
• Birthplace of Danny Barker — steps away
• First Protestant Church in New Orleans — 0.2 mi
• Old Ursuline Convent — 0.2 mi