Marsalis Mansion Motel

Ellis Marsalis Sr. reached New Orleans from Summit, Mississippi, in 1927 and drove a horse-drawn hearse before he went into business for himself. He turned a barn on the river shore into the motel; accounts put the opening in 1943 or 1944. Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and Dinah Washington stayed there, and so did Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. In 1963 he helped found an association of Southern Black hotel owners, and from 1951 to 1966 he helped register Black voters in Jefferson Parish. The motel closed in September 1986 and was torn down in 1993.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 5.0 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 5.4 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.
• Congo Square — 5.6 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 5.8 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.

More markers nearby

• Camp Parapet — 0.3 mi
• Jefferson Highway — 0.8 mi
• Huey P. Long Bridge — 1.0 mi
• Wedell - Williams Airport Site — 1.4 mi