My Bourbon Home

The Mangin family forged iron here for five generations. Jean Antoine Mangin came from France in 1832 and set up a shop at 621-623 Bourbon Street, where his descendants made wrought and cast iron. Charles and John Mangin prized hand-forged wrought iron as unique and cast iron as mass-produced. Their work includes the arrow-style balconies on the shop and the fence around the family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. The shop closed in 1920 because no young workers wanted to apprentice, and John, who died in 1948, was called the last of the French Quarter forgerons.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• Congo Square — 0.2 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• The French Opera House — steps away
• Merieult House — steps away
• Former site of Holy Family Sisters' Convent — steps away
• LaBranche Buildings — steps away