The Presbytère

The building served commerce and then law. It was used commercially until 1834, when the Louisiana Supreme Court began using it, and cathedral officials sold it to the city in 1853. The city sold it to the state in 1908, three years before it joined the Louisiana State Museum. Its cupola, missing since the 1915 New Orleans hurricane, was replaced in 2005. Gilberto Guillemard drew it in 1791 as a twin of the Cabildo on the other side of St. Louis Cathedral, and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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 — steps away
  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 — 0.2 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 — 0.4 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

• Bourbon Street Attack Memorial Crosses — steps away
• Cathedral of St. Louis, King of France — steps away
• Lower Pontalba Building — steps away
• Jackson Square — steps away