Upper Pontalba Building

Baroness Micaela Almonester Pontalba built the upper building on St. Peter Street in 1850 and the lower one on St. Ann Street in 1851, with James Gallier and Henry Howard as architects. Her family kept the buildings until the 1920s, when they fell into disrepair. The Pontalba Building Museum Association bought the upper building in 1930 and turned it over to the city, which has owned it since. The 1930s renovations converted the row houses into apartments, and both buildings became National Historic Landmarks on May 30, 1974.

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 — steps away
  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

• Literary Landmark — steps away
• The Cabildo — steps away
• Don Bernardo de Galvez — steps away
• David Bannister Morgan — steps away