New Basin Canal

The canal this lakefront stub recalls began as a business scheme. The New Orleans Canal and Banking Company, incorporated in 1831, wanted a waterway to the American sector to rival the Carondelet Canal in the Creole part of town. Digging began in 1832, and small vessels used it by 1838. Irish immigrants did most of the work for about a dollar a day, since the company judged enslaved labor too costly, and yellow fever struck the swamp crews. Nobody counted the dead; estimates run from 500 to over 20,000, and 8,000 is repeated most.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 5.3 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 5.3 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 5.6 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 — 5.6 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

• Lakefront "Seawall" — steps away
• Fort St. John (Spanish Fort) — 1.8 mi
• Beatles Only Concert Performance in Louisiana — 2.6 mi
• Duelling Grounds — 3.0 mi