Saint Augustine Church, New Orleans

The pews are the church's argument. Free people of color who organized in the 1830s to build it bought pews for their own families in what became known as the War of the Pews, buying three for every one bought by whites. They also bought every pew in both side aisles and gave them to enslaved worshippers. The French architect J. N. B. de Pouilly designed the church, dedicated on October 9, 1842. After Hurricane Katrina the archdiocese moved to close it; parishioners barricaded themselves in the rectory for two weeks, and in March 2009 it came off probation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 0.3 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 — 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 Cabildo — 0.5 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• Tomb of the Unknown Slave — steps away
• First Recording Studio of Cosimo Matassa — 0.2 mi
• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — 0.2 mi
• Mahalia Jackson — 0.2 mi