TREME / STORYVILLE / CEMETERY / VOODOO TOUR

Experience Treme, legendary neighborhood and tremendous source of New Orleans, Creole, and African-American culture. Begin your journey from Backatown Coffee in the site of notorious red light district Storyville. 

 

Enter the former Iberville Housing Project (now the Bienville Basin Apartments) to learn its history, including that of Storyville where you will see all three of the district’s surviving buildings, as well as learn of today’s New Urbanism. 

 

From here, experience St. Louis Cemetery #2 from the gates, New Orleans’ most magnificent aboveground cemetery.  Its three squares tell many remarkable stories, starting in Square #1 with the Frenchman Claude Treme, who married manumitted slave Julie Moro, owner of the former plantation land which the couple would subdivide into residential plots to create the famed New Orleans neighborhood and this tour’s namesake. This cemetery includes the vault of French architect Jacques Nicolas Bussiere de Pouilly, who singlehandedly determined the aesthetic scheme of New Orleans cemeteries;  tomb of renowned drummer Paul Barbarin and his wife Odelia, along with Paul’s nephew and wife, esteemed jazz couple Danny and Blue Lu Barker, right around the corner from Ernie and Antoinette K-Doe; and Square Three which contains what Historian Joe Logdon called “The most significant collections of memorials to African-American achievement in the world.”