The Rault Center High-Rise Fire of 1972

The first fire was reported at 7:30 a.m. on November 29, 1972, in a sixteenth-floor dressing room and was put out quickly. Hours later a second blaze on the fifteenth floor spread through the top floors and the penthouse. Firefighters' ladders were too short and their water could not reach the upper floors. Some of those trapped jumped, eight men from the Lamplighter Club were lifted off the roof by helicopter, and six people died: Jacquelyn Maillho, Norris Farley, Janice McBeth, Wilma Williams, Charles Michel and Lloyd Caldwell. The cause was never established.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.6 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.6 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.
• Congo Square — 0.7 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

• Jazz (Loyola Avenue) — steps away
• Hurricane Katrina Memorial — steps away
• The Pythian Temple — steps away
• New Orleans Massacre Of 1866 — steps away