Original Pierre Maspero's Slave Exchange

A story about Andrew Jackson and the Lafitte brothers hangs over this corner. Both this building and the Old Absinthe House claim the meeting. In 1950 Maspero's owner sued the Absinthe House over a plaque repeating the story, and in 1951 a Civil District Court judge dismissed the suit, calling the legend hearsay. The National Park Service calls the place the Exchange Coffee House, where planters, merchants and privateers met. An 1788 house burned in 1794, and the present building was allegedly built between 1795 and 1810. The marker says enslaved people were sold here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  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 — 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 — 0.4 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

• Hermann - Grima House — steps away
• Natchez Steamboats — steps away
• The Steamer New Orleans — steps away
• The Birthplace of "Dixie" — 0.2 mi