Jackson Square: The French Quarter Is Not Simply French
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Transcript
The French Quarter is called French because France founded New Orleans in 1718.
Much of the architecture visitors recognize was built under Spanish rule or after Spanish-era fires.
That is the first correction.
The city passed from France to Spain in the eighteenth century, returned briefly to French control and entered the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Jackson Square—formerly the Place d'Armes—sat at the civic center through those political changes.
Government, church, commerce and military ceremony all faced the square.
The Cabildo beside the cathedral was a Spanish colonial government building.
The Pontalba buildings that frame the square came later in the nineteenth century.
The landscape visitors experience as timeless Creole New Orleans is actually layered French, Spanish, Caribbean and American history.
The square also sat inside a slave society.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants made up a large part of colonial New Orleans's population and labor force.
Free people of color formed an unusually significant community compared with many other American cities, though freedom did not erase racial hierarchy.
For visitors, the French Quarter can feel like a preserved European fragment inside the United States.
That is too simple.
New Orleans became distinctive because empires, African cultures, Caribbean migration and the American republic collided here.
Begin at Jackson Square because almost every layer is visible at once.
The name changed.
The governments changed.
The city kept using the same room.