Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop

The building went up in the 1770s during Spanish colonial New Orleans — briquette-entre-poteaux construction, brick infill set between cypress posts — and it is one of the oldest surviving structures in the French Quarter. Whether the pirate Jean Lafitte actually ran a blacksmith shop here as a front for smuggling is a question with no documentation either way. His brother Pierre was a blacksmith. Their associate Renato Beluche may have owned the building. That's where the record stops and the legend starts, and the legend has done just fine for two centuries. What's certain: Roger "Tom" Caplinger turned the abandoned structure into Café Lafitte in the mid-1940s, and it became a bohemian night spot that drew Tennessee Williams and Noël Coward. Caplinger lost the building in 1953 — he never held clear title — and opened Café Lafitte in Exile down the block, which claims to be the oldest gay bar in the United States. The original building kept serving drinks and never stopped. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970. It has never been air-conditioned, not even in August. The main room is lit entirely by candlelight — no electric lights. The piano bar in the back operates nightly and remains one of the most atmospheric drinking rooms in a city that knows how to pour in the dark. Cash preferred. Open daily at 941 Bourbon Street.