Picayune Pier

Oysters came to the French Market by lugger, a small round-hulled sloop under a colorful lug sail, from reefs in St. Bernard, Plaquemines and Lafourche parishes between mid-September and late April. At Picayune Tier, also called Lugger Landing, a wooden platform hinged to the wharf rose and fell with the river while crews unloaded sacks into a pavilion. On Christmas Eve 1915 fifteen boats landed a record 2,010 barrels. Boat motors, the Public Belt Railroad's growth onto the landings and refrigerated trucks ended the trade by midcentury.

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 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.2 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.
• Congo Square — 0.5 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

• Natchez Steamboats — steps away
• Jean Baptiste Baudreau II — steps away
• The Steamer New Orleans — steps away
• Bienville Monument — steps away