St. Louis Hotel

Creoles of New Orleans built the hotel to rival an Anglo-American-made hotel at the time near Canal Street on the upriver side, called the St. Charles Hotel. In February 1838, a contract for the French Quarter hotel's construction was signed; it was given the name "The City Exchange". The hotel was the center of social activities for Creoles and visiting Europeans. It was meant to be a creole place; a place for aristocrats to eat, drink, make love, and buy and sell slaves.[1] J.N.B. de Pouilly was the architect for the hotel.[2]

Walking into the hotel, one could see the large auction block where slaves were sold. The auction block was under the grand rotunda of the building. Some slaves were brought in by sea from Baltimore, only for a number of them to be sold immediately upon disembarking. Others were put into slave pens in the French Quarter.[1]

The St. Louis Hotel was where Maspero's Exchange was located, which was just one of about fifty businesses in New Orleans to sell slaves.[3] An example of the revenue produced by selling slaves at this location is from one auctioneer, Joseph Le Carpentier, whose slave sales totaled $57,075 in 1840,[4] the equivalent of which is $1,585,416.67 in 2015.[5]

The original hotel was host to a wide range of important people within the South. During the pre-Civil War period, the hotel was host to a large number of balls and meetings, the most well known being the bal travesti, where Henry Clay gave his only speech in New Orleans.[6]

On occasion, the state legislature held sessions in the hotel's grand rotunda.[7]

The St. Louis Hotel has a long and extensive history of having to be rebuilt and revamped since its opening in 1838. In 1841, the hotel, then known as the St. Louis Exchange hotel, experienced a huge fire which swept through the four-story building, destroying it completely. However, the hotel was quickly rebuilt with the help of funding from the Citizens Bank at a cost of $600,000. This time, though, the building was rebuilt with "fire-resistant components such as a lightweight rotunda composed of a honeycomb of hollow clay pots".[8]

For the next twenty years, the new building was a central location for 'French New Orleans', hosting many lavish banquets and balls until the 1862 capture of New Orleans by Union forces during the American Civil War. The hotel became a military hospital for Union soldiers; it had lost its grandeur and elegance. During the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), it was sold to the state of Louisiana and became “the de facto Louisiana state capitol."[8]

For many years, the hotel passed from one owner to the next, serving various purposes such as a bank and a restaurant. Unfortunately the building slowly began to decay, "like the French Quarter around it", amounting to nothing but "crumbling marble walls".[1] A few years later, due to the hurricane of 1915, the building was completely destroyed; all that remained of it was a huge heap of rubble. The once "prime real estate would serve as nothing more than a salvage yard for decades to come".[8]

After much discussion among New Orleanians as to restoring the charm and prominence of the French Quarter, the hotel was rebuilt in 1960, now as the Royal Orleans. The 20th-century hotel encompassed the same European grand design as the old one, including the "exact drawings of the remaining stone arches ... and [the] exact duplicates of the Spanish wrought iron railings"[1] which had once graced the hotel.[1] Omni Hotels of Dallas, Texas, took over the hotel's lease in 1986, and named it the Omni Royal Orleans. As of 2008, Omni maintained a 25% stake in the property and continued to manage it.[9][10]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to St. Louis Hotel, New Orleans.

• Antebellum Louisiana: Urban Life at the Louisiana State Museum
• 2015 slavery exhibit, Historic New Orleans Collection at The Times-Picayune