The Old Portage

Long before the street grid, the bayou was a canoe road. Its name, Bayouk Choupic, is linked to the Houma language, and Native paddlers used it from pre-Columbian times and carried across the short ground to the river because the water levels differed. The French built a small fort, Fort St. Jean, at the lake end in 1701. The trail became the Grand Route St. John, later replaced by Esplanade Avenue, and the Carondelet Canal joined the bayou to the back of the city. The canal was filled in the twentieth century, and the Lafitte Greenway follows its line.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.6 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.
• Congo Square — 1.7 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.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.0 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.
• The Cabildo — 2.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Pitot House — 0.2 mi
• Allard Plantation — 0.4 mi
• Duelling Grounds — 0.7 mi
• Fair Grounds Race Course — 0.7 mi