Page 16 - Welcome 2022
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    The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival began here in the 1970’s, and in 1993, Congo Square was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Congo Square is now part of the Louis Armstrong Park complex. A life size Elizabeth Catlett sculpture of Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong grasping his trumpet and trademark handkerchief gazes benignly toward Congo Square. Nearby, lights from the huge chandeliers in the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts glitter over land that once heard the Voodoo chants of West African women.
Rampart Street from Congo Square, turn left into Treme via Saint Phillip, Ursulines, Governor Nicholls, or Barracks Street, then one block to Saint Claude, another block to Tremé Street. You are passing houses built by people of color over 160 years ago. While some are in disrepair, the restored houses can give you a feel of walking down these same streets of the 19th century.
Historic sites in Treme include St. Augustine Church at the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Governor Nicholls Street. Established by free people of color, who also purchased pews to ensure that the enslaved could attend services at the church, St. Augustine is the oldest African-American Catholic parish in the nation and was one of the first 26 sites designated on the state’s Louisiana African- American Heritage Trail.
The St. Louis Cemeteries
Crossing Basin Street from Congo Square brings us to Saint Louis Cemetery #1, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans. It was established in 1789. Racially integrated from its inception, the cemetery is noted for its above-ground grave sites, French
inscriptions, wall vault burials, elaborate tombs of Benevolent societies, and architecture that mirrors the city. Still used for burials today, Saint Louis Cemetery #1 is the final resting place for Voodoo priestess
Marie Laveau, civil disobedient Homer Plessy and others.
Traveling down St. Louis Street will bring you past the site that was once Storyville, the city’s red light district that lasted from 1890 to 1917. It was the neighborhood of ‘sporting houses’ run by women such as the “beautiful Negro madame ‘Minnie HaHa,’” Fannie Sweet, and Lulu White. The houses offered music to their clientele and are considered the early incubators of Jazz music. Many traditional jazz musicians such as Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Bunk Johnson and others honed their skills in the parlors and juke joints that occupied the area. The Navy demolished most of Storyville in 1917 for what they considered its deleterious effects on the troops
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                The Tremé neighborhood is adjacent to Congo Square and on the other side of the N. Rampart Street border of the French Quarter. Many consider Tremé to be the cultural heart of Black New Orleans. Developed in the early 1800’s, people of color owned 80 percent of the properties in Treme’ at one time or another. At the turn of the 20th century, many of jazz’s earliest musicians lived and honed their crafts in Tremé.
Today, Treme still provides an inspirational ambiance for writers, artists, musicians, and other professionals. It is not uncommon to see young boys walking these streets rat-tat- tatting on drums.
To visit Tremé, walk down river on North
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