New Orleans Jazz Museum®

The land at this corner has been in private ownership since 1754. The building assembled here in 1781 — constructed in the "briquette-entre-poteaux" style, with bricks made of Mississippi River mud, Spanish moss, and horsehair — survived both the Great Fire of 1788 and the second fire of 1794 that together destroyed most of French colonial New Orleans.

It is among only a handful of pre-fire structures still standing in the French Quarter today - among the oldest buildings in the Mississippi River Valley, a building that was old when the United States was young.

In 1809, a French Louisianian merchant operating in this neighborhood wrote directly to President Thomas Jefferson, in French, about books forwarded from a European scholar and a separate request to import European paintings into the new United States. Jefferson replied on November 28, 1809. The correspondence survives in the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. The neighborhood's history of culture, commerce, and exchange runs deeper than the jazz era alone.