1. Nowhere does the power of New Orleans culture resound more eloquently than at the corner of Rampart and St. Ann streets. There you’ll find the entrance to both Louis Armstrong Park and Congo Square—the modern human, embodiment of the Crescent City’s contribution to world music and culture, side by side with the ancient, terrestrial one. With his trumpet playing, singing and acting Armstrong became one of the most recognizable artists of the 20th century. Congo Square, where Africans played African music, danced African dances and cooked African food throughout much of the American slavery period, was the incubator for African American music and Afro-Creole cuisine. In retrospect it seems only natural that this piece of land be chosen as the place where New Orleans would remember its most important son. But the journey from Congo Square to Armstrong Park encompasses many twists of fate, name changes and heart breaks. And it is a story that is still unfolding.

II. While the name Congo Square is only as old as the African presence in Louisiana, the significance of that piece of ground as a multi-ethnic gathering place extends deep in the annals of Louisiana Native American tradition.

“Before European explorers arrived, the location of Congo Square and its vicinity lay in the proximity of an Indian portage, a transportation route that Native Americans traveled between the Mississippi and Bayou Chopic,” Freddi Williams Evans writes in her book “Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans.”

“. … the Quinipissa, Acolapissa, Ouma (Houma), Chitimachas, Tunicas, and the Bayogoulas among others are known to have, at some point, resided or camped in the area that became New Orleans,” Evans writes. As John McCusker, co-author of the book, Jockomo: the Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians, said in an interview, “Native Americans called it Balbancha, a place of many languages. It was an indigenous American Babel, if you will. It was multi lingual and multi cultural before the Europeans got here.” From the earliest days of the French colony, Africans, both enslaved and free, gathered in Congo Square to express their culture on Sundays. While similar gatherings did take place in other parts of the city, an 1817 city ordinance forbade such gatherings anywhere but in Congo Square. But Congo Square was always contested ground. Around 1816, the “Congo Circus” performed in the square. Despite its name, the circus apparently had little connection to the African dances in the square and, in fact, black people were not allowed to attend it, notes Jerah Johnson in his book “Congo Square in New Orleans. In its long history, the square has been known by nearly a dozen names—Place des Negres, Place Publique, Place du Cirque, Circus Park, etc. But the name that has endured into modernity is Congo Square.

III. So what happened Sundays in Congo Square?
 The most famous description was written by Benjamin H. Latrobe, the English born architect whose most famous work includes the design of the United States capital building. Traveling to New Orleans in 1819 he witnessed “5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square, dancing in a series of circular clusters. What he initially took to be the sound of horses trampling on a wooden floor, turned out to be the sound of drumming. Latrobe’s description of ecstatic dancing may well have described a Voodoo or other religious ceremony. By the mid 1800s, as the percentage of New Orleanians born in Africa decreased, observers note that the dances performed in the square became less African and more African American. In addition to his verbal descriptions, Latrobe also drew pictures of the instruments played in Congo Square and thus made it possible to compare those instruments with their parallels in west African nations including Benin, Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana. “No other spot has been more often mentioned in scholarly speculation about the origins of jazz or about the relationship of pre-jazz New Orleans music to jazz itself. [U]nlike other fly-by-night kitchens, garages, backyards, barrows, and nightclubs in New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas city, Chicago and Harlem—the square has had a continuous history, and one that is largely documentable,” Jerah Johnson wrote.

Many scholars, including George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn noted that the songs sung in Congo Square embodied an amalgam of languages including remnants of African languages, Louisiana Creole, French and English. After the American purchase of Louisiana in 1803, the influx of English-speaking people of African descent resulted in an increase in English language songs.

IV. Congo Square served as a center of New Orleans cultural and civic life for reasons that go beyond its role as a place of song and dance. The square was also a market place, where people of African descent sold foodstuffs and other wares. Then, as now, the square has been important politically as well.

During the slavery period, Congo Square was the place where many public executions took place. In an eerie echo of that slavery-era history, in 1891, 11 Sicilian immigrants were lynched in the square, after some of them had been found not guilty of murdering the New Orleans police chief. With chants of “Yes! Yes, hang the dagoes!” a mob took the men and hanged them in what has been called the largest mass lynching in American history.

Congo Square also was the approximate location of an 1867 demonstration by African American citizens aimed at desegregating the city’s streetcars. It was the place where the Emancipation Proclamation was celebrated and President Abraham Lincoln’s death was mourned. It was the place of political rallies and union meetings. The city’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration usually culminates in Congo Square.

Despite the square’s enduring significance to black New Orleanians, the city’s political leadership has often sought to create a wedge between the black community and its beloved square. In the 1850s, as in recent times, there was talk of moving City Hall into the square. In 1859, The Times-Picayune published an article noting that some German-descended New Orleanians proposed renaming the square to honor Alexander von Humboldt, the German explorer who died that year. “[W]e hope the Council will take favorable action in the matter. Certain[ly] Humboldt is preferred to Congo,” the newspaper opined. That name change was never made official. Once Place d’Armes was renamed to honor the former president and architect of the genocidal Trail of Tears, Congo Square was renamed Place d’Armes.

In perhaps the gravest insult, in 1893, the New Orleans city council officially changed the name of the square to Beauregard Square in honor of a Confederate general. That was the name it still bore when the first Louisiana Jazz and Heritage Festival took place there in 1970.

Congo Square was so important as a symbol and embodiment of African culture presence in Louisiana that local newspapers made it the frequent target of snide and derogatory comments.

The Sunday Delta of November 30, 1862 wrote, Time was when the best opportunity to see the Ethiopian-the genuine Negro-fresh and fragrant from the spicy coast of Senegambia-was on Congo Square, on any summer Sunday afternoon, when he congregated in huge numbers, to indulge in the pastimes of dancing and in playing the banjo and bones. But that time is passed. Congo Square is converted into the Place d'Armes, and Sambo is driven out of this his terrestrial paradise, to seek recreation in less loved localities. We believe he now has no place of general and promiscuous resort, but is driven to congregating in small squads in cabarets or out-of- the-way places, where, instead of exercising his cruralities in the mazy figures of the dance, he addicts himself to cards, dominoes, or to the more hurtful practice of wetting his throat to keep his body from rusting.

V. Congo Square has been the site of more than one great concert hall, two of which are still extant. The Globe Ball Room opened in 1851 on the corner of St. Claude (now Henriette DeLille) and St. Peter streets, and boasted a wide variety of performances including operas and other western classical performances. By 1890, once the Globe had fallen into disrepair, “a new, three-story brick building identified by the city as a “Negro dance hall”–Globe Hall–stood on this spot,” Jordan Hirsch wrote on the “A Closer Walk” historical website. Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the seminal trumpet player, played there regularly as did other early jazz musicians such as trombonist Edward “Kidd” Ory and clarinetist Johnny Dodds. In 1918, the structure burned down. It was replaced in the late 1920 with the Municipal Auditorium (which was renamed the Morris F.X. Jeff Municipal Auditorium in 1994.) That facility, which opened in January of 1930 was conceived at least in part as a replacement for the French Opera House at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse streets. It was destroyed by a fire in 1919. The auditorium, an impressive five-story, Italian Renaissance-style, 75,000 square foot, limestone structure opened in January of 1930 with a performance by the legendary blackface entertainer Al Jolson.

In 1973, the Theater for Performing Arts opened in Congo Square, providing a 2,100 seat venue for the New Orleans Ballet Association and the New Orleans Opera Association. In 1995, the theater was renamed the Mahalia Jackson Theater for Performing Arts to honor the gospel legend who was born in 1911 in a section of uptown New Orleans long known colloquially as Niggertown.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG PARK

I. Louis Armstrong was born in a modest wooden house on August 4, 1901 on a street known as Jane Alley. (Armstrong insisted that the real name was James Alley, not Jane Alley.) While Armstrong tended to wax nostalgically about his times in New Orleans, he was often disrespected in here, even after he became an international superstar. In 1964, the city of New Orleans elected to demolish his boyhood home and others around it to make way for the New Orleans Traffic Court and police headquarters. That was but one of many examples of the city choosing to demolish important jazz landmarks rather than honor the physical legacy of the city’s signature sonic expression. (Note, this story is slightly more complicated, but all the more gut wrenching than it appears on the surface. The contractor tore down the neighborhood, but left Armstrong’s house untouched. The plan was for a jazz organization to move the home to a safe place. When they arrived the next day, they found someone had burned the house down.)

The Faubourg Treme neighborhood, long a center of New Orleans Afro-Creole culture, was deemed an appropriate place to create public park modeled after Tivoli Gardens in the Netherlands. As historian Lawrence Powell wrote in January 17, 2012 issue of “Southern Spaces,” “There’s been a more or less constant whirligig of contention involving uptown white elites, a newly-aroused Tremé community, and antagonistic pro-growth factions of Afro-Creole politicians. They have fought about park management and drawn swords over whether a Tivoli-like paid-admission amusement venue should be allowed in.”

New Orleans Mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison, a staunch segregationist, envisioned creating a Lincoln Center like entertainment complex in Congo Square. Under his successor, Victor Schiro, dozens of homes and other structures were demolished. "I remember when they knocked it over, the late "Tom Stagg told Gallivan Burwell for an article in 2005 in Where Y’at. "It only took about three days. I never saw so many bulldozers in my life.” The Tivoli-like facility that the city fathers envisioned never came to fruition. Though with the opening of the Theater for Performing Arts in 1973, Congo Square had its second performance venue and in that way approximated the early vision of a complex of entertainment facilities parallel to the Lincoln Center Complex in New York.

II. Shortly after he was elected mayor of the city, Moon Landrieu was faced with a tragedy and an opportunity. In New York, Louis Armstrong had died and in New Orleans, Beauregard Square had never been developed. The Citizens Committee for a Memorial to Louis Armstrong, co-chaired by Juvenile Court Judge Dutch Morial and States-Item editor Charles Ferguson, recommended that the mayor create a memorial park on the site of the square.

In 1969, Louis and Lucille Armstrong created the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation because, as Louis put it, “I want to give back some of the goodness I received.” When the time to create the park in honor of Louis, Lucille was a consistent champion of the idea and wrote letters to the mayor expressing her opinion of the developments. Specifically, she wrote in support of the idea that the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a public, arts high school, be housed in the old McDonough No. 41 school building which was located on the grounds of the park. “Louis would have been pleased to know that the park would have a facility for high school students because of the opportunities it would afford the youth,” she wrote in a letter to Mayor Landrieu. “He felt the hope of the world was in the youth and would have liked them to have the advantages he didn’t have as he was growing up.” Ultimately, NOCCA was housed in another old school building uptown on Perrier Street.

The park, as envisioned, was quite elegant. Stone pavers were arranged in circles to echo the circular group dances historically performed in Congo Square. There were fountains, a faux lagoon over which short bridges were constructed and heirloom rose bushes. Historic buildings that survived the Treme demolition were incorporated among the park’s featured attractions. Other buildings, constructed during or shortly after the heyday of Congo Square, were moved to the park to lend an added feeling of historical heft. In 1976, Elizabeth Catlett, the famed sculptor and graphic artist, was commissioned to create a 10-foot, bronze statue of Armstrong for the park.

III. Louis Armstrong Park opened in 1980 during the administration of Ernest “Dutch” Morial. “Performing at a jam session to commemorate the event were a who’s who of musical greats: Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Al Hirt, Allen Toussaint, Lionel Hampton, Kid Thomas, the Olympia Brass Band and more,” the Times-Picayune wrote at the time.

In an article in the Summer 1980 edition of the New Orleans Jazz Club publication, “The Second Line,” the editor, Donald Marquis, noted that there were 12,000 people in attendance at the dedication, including Lucille Armstrong, the trumpeter’s widow. Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Dave Brubeck and the Olympia Brass Band all played at the ceremony. But Marquis lamented that, “Somehow, in all of the V.I.P. ceremony, the several thousand ‘little people’ who contributed almost all of the $30,000 for the statue were overlooked. Also noticeably overlooked were the major fundraising efforts of Floyd Levin and the New Orleans Jazz Club of Southern California and our own New Orleans Jazz Club. Although Louis Armstrong knew kings, presidents, millionaires and other V.I.P.’s he was most comfortable with the people who truly loved his music—the real jazz fans of the world.”

IV. Armstrong Park has always had an uneasy relationship with the neighborhood surrounding it. The fence constructed around the park made clear that the facility did not belong to the neighborhood that sacrificed to make it possible. The Treme Community Center and Joseph A. Craig Elementary School, both of which sit adjacent to the park, have no real connection to it. While the park often hosted important gatherings, it never seemed to develop a real identity or focus.

In the late 1990s, the city of New Orleans granted the National Park Service a free, 99-year lease in the hope that the federal agency could make better use of the park space and the buildings within it. The federal government invested $3 million in the park’s buildings, but was never able to develop compelling program to attract visitors. In 2018, the park service returned Armstrong Park to city control.

The park and its facilities were badly damaged in 2005 as a result of the federal levee failures created by Hurricane Katrina. Then-mayor Ray Nagin oversaw the park’s renovation and added a sculpture garden including sculpture depicting jazz musicians, Mardi Gras Indians and Congo Square dancers.

V. There are four historical buildings located in Armstrong Park, Perseverance Hall No. 4 and “the Kitchen Building,” which were among the few buildings in the footprint of Armstrong Park that were not demolished, and the De Pouilly-Rabassa House, the Reinman House, which were moved to the site from other locations.

Perseverance Hall #4 was built roughly two centuries ago and is the oldest masonic building in Louisiana. Since 1973, it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Creole jazz bands reportedly played for black and white audiences. Various organizations, both black and white, rented Perseverance Hall for dances, concerts, Monday night banquets, and recitals.

From 1984 until 2005, the Kitchen Building served as the studio for WWOZ. 90.7 FM, the community radio station. In an interview for 64Parishes.org, David Freedman, the station’s long time general manager explained, “The building we were in was called the Kitchen Building because it served as the commissary for the adjacent Perseverance Hall. Well, operationally it was a dream, and it was a nightmare. A dream because it was the center of the Treme universe, and everybody poured in, and we were in this paradisiacal park, which was just a drop-dead gorgeous place to be. Operationally it was a nightmare. First of all, like all of our spaces we’ve ever had, it was way too small. It was only three rooms, to run a radio station from. And we had hundreds of volunteers and hundreds of people streaming through there, artists, guests, and so forth. Also the security was just dreadful. We were in an isolated section, where at one point the gate was locked behind us and the only way to get out was to go clear across the park.”

 “Big D” Dennis Schaibly, a WWOZ host recalled in the same article, “There were things that happened in the Treehouse that never could happen any other place. Best example: we were having a pledge drive show in 2004. It’s Tuesday and we’re talking about Snooks [Eaglin, legendary guitarist] coming in for Billy Delle’s show on Wednesday night. And he’s gonna be in the studio, and all the people want to be there. And literally we’re sitting outside the front door and we said “Why don’t we just throw a big party out here in the courtyard?” And we got on the phone, we got a group called the Brotherhood of Groove to come and be the house band, and we set the whole program out on the back porch of the family house next door. And Snooks came and played, Eddie Bo came and played. George Porter was there. Glen David Andrews, John Boutte came and sang, and it was just a big party. People brought food and it was just a big neighborhood gathering.”

The Rabassa-De Pouilly House, a raised Creole cottage was the residence of New Orleans architect and Treme resident J. N. B. de Pouilly, who worked on the expansion and renovation of the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. Jean Louis Rabassa built it in 1825. It is the one of the only existing records within New Orleans of the creole cottage wherein the rez de chausée, or main level, is raised eight feet on brick piers.

The Reinman House, which dates back to the 1880s, was relocated from 618 S. Gayoso Street to the park in the 1970s. It once served as the office for the park manager. Though designed to resemble a historic building, the Firehouse was built in the 1980s.

In 2022, the Preservation Resource Center paid to stabilize the buildings, which had been badly damaged by Hurricane Ida the year before.

VI. In 2010, as part of the post-Hurricane Katrina renovation of Armstrong Park, then mayor Ray Nagin commissioned the Roots of Music Cultural Sculptor Garden as a visible tribute to the city’s culture history .

Adewálé Adénlé created a metal bas-relief depiction of the dance that took place in Congo Square. Steve Kline created “French Opera House,” an abstract tribute to the performance facility of the same name that stood at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse street from 1859 until it was destroyed by fire in 1919. Sheleen Jones sculpted a statue of Allison “Tootie” Montana, the late big chief of the Yellow Pocahontas gang of Mardi Gras Indians. She also sculpted a procession of musicians depicting a second line parade. Kimberly Dummons paid tribute to the seminal trumpeter Charles “Buddy” Bolden in a sculpture that portrays him in three different positions simultaneously.

VI. While there is general agreement that Armstrong Park and the buildings within it have never been utilized to their fullest potential, there has never been a consensus on how best to exploit the facility. Mayor LaToya Cantrell resurrected a 150-year-old idea that City Hall should be housed in Congo Square. The idea was met with stiff community opposition in the streets and in print. Ultimately Mayor Cantrell charged city residents with the task of developing alternative uses for the site. From this seed, the Save Our Soul Coalition was born.