Mid-19th century New Orleans had two grand hotels — the St. Charles Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in the American Sector above Canal Street, and the St. Louis Exchange Hotel in the French Quarter on St. Louis Street between Chartres and Royal. Each reflected the two dominant cultures that divided antebellum New Orleans.
The St. Charles Hotel was a popular gathering place for the city’s growing number, and influence, of Anglo-Americans while the St. Louis, seen here in 1906, was at the center of social life for the city’s Creole population.
Constructed in 1838, destroyed by fire and rebuilt by 1841, the St. Louis Hotel, also known as the Exchange Hotel, had a rather colorful history before, during and after the Civil War.
Designed by the French-born New Orleans architect Jacques Nicolas Bussiére De Pouilly, the St. Louis was the grand salon for prosperous Creoles. It also was a must stopover for important visitors such as James Silk Buckingham, a former member of the British Parliament who visited the city in 1840 during his four-year tour of North America. In his 1842 book “A Journey Through the Slave States of North America,” Buckingham gave a detailed description of the hotel’s exterior and furnishings, though he found it less “imposing” than the St. Charles Hotel over in the American Sector.
“The entrance into the Exchange at the St. Louis,” he wrote, “is through a handsome vestibule, or hall…which leads to the rotunda. This is crowned by a beautiful and lofty dome, with finely ornamented ceiling in the interior, and a variegated marble pavement. In the outer hall, the meetings of the merchants take place in in ‘Change hours; and in the rotunda, pictures are exhibited, and auctions are held for every description of goods.”
The vising Englishman went on to describe the hotel ballroom and a local Creole custom. “The suite of ballrooms forming part of this establishment, is unequaled, for size and beauty, in the United States; the painted ceiling of the large room being especially admired; and from the taste of the Creole population encouraging balls, concerts, masquerades, and fetes, this department of the hotel is in a constant occupation as any other. The accommodations are adapted to about 200 guests; the style of living is perfectly French; and many of the visitors sleep at the hotel, and send for their dinner, as in Paris, from the restaurant; but for this reason, few except the French and Creole population of New Orleans, frequent the St. Louis.”
But not all was so cheery. While visiting the hotel, Buckingham noted with disgust the auctioning off an enslaved family. He also observed that most of those purchasing slaves were local Creole planters.
“Often as I had witnessed this painful scene in the old times of the West Indies,” he wrote, “and in several of the countries of the East, it had lost none of its pain by repetition; it appeared, indeed, more revolting here, in contrast with the republican institutions of America, than under the monarchical governments of Europe, or the absolute despotism of Asia.”
With the fall of New Orleans to Union forces in 1862, the hotel’s glory days were over. Federal troops used it as a military hospital and during Reconstruction it became headquarters for the Union-backed state government.
After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the St. Louis, also known as the Hotel Royal, slowly declined until it closed in 1912. This 1906 photograph, showing broken windows and decaying exterior walls, reveals just how far this once important center of French Quarter life had fallen. And like a metaphor for the declining political and economic power of the city’s Creole population, the hurricane of 1915 delivered the coup de grâce when it partially destroyed the empty building. What remained was demolished the following year.
The site stayed vacant until the late 1950s, when local investors financed construction of the Royal Orleans Hotel, now the Omni Royal Orleans. Designed by Arthur Davis and Samuel Wilson Jr., its exterior is an almost exact replica of the original St. Louis.
Times changed. The old St. Louis and St. Charles hotels are both gone, the French Quarter is no longer the center of Creole life, and the American Sector above Canal Street is now the Central Business District.
