Merchants Mutual Insurance Company Building

The facade was designed to advertise. William A. Freret Jr. gave the insurance company a cast-iron front whose parapet carries a fireplug and hose, an anchor, cotton bales, barrels and a ship's prow, with spiral columns between the second-floor windows and fluted columns above them. Critics disliked the mixed styles while it went up in 1859, and an anonymous Daily Picayune writer answered that architects should not be bound to traditional orders and that Americans should create a style of their own. The ground-floor arcade once stood on four Corinthian columns; two remain.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.3 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 — 0.5 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 — 0.5 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

• America's First Movie Theater / Vitascope Hall — steps away
• Louis André Martinet / Office of L.A. Martinet, The Crusader & Comité Des Citoyens — steps away
• Jefferson Highway — steps away
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — steps away