The Flood of 1927

Dynamiting the levee at Caernarvon, downstream in St. Bernard Parish, was meant to spare New Orleans in 1927. Bankers and business leaders urged Governor O. H. Simpson to order it, over objections from people living below. From April 29, engineers used 39 tons of dynamite over ten days. About 10,000 residents were evacuated, and those with nowhere to go were housed in a New Orleans warehouse, white people on the fifth floor and Black people on the sixth. Promised full compensation, some received an average of $274 and thousands received nothing.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.8 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 4.5 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.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.6 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.6 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

• The Original Teddy Bear — steps away
• Boré Plantation - Audubon Park — 0.2 mi
• Audubon Park History — 0.4 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 1.2 mi