Hotel Monteleone — Carousel Bar

Royal Street was commerce and banking when Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian cobbler, set up shop there around 1880. In 1886 he bought a small hotel at the corner of Royal and Iberville, then expanded by acquiring the Commercial Hotel next door. The family added rooms in 1903, added 300 more in 1908 and renamed the place Hotel Monteleone, then added 200 more in 1928 — a year before the crash. It's one of the few family-owned hotels in the country to survive the Depression. The original building came down in 1954; what stands now is the replacement, a high-rise that is the only one in the interior French Quarter. Four generations of Monteleones have run it. Writers kept coming back. Hemingway, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty — all stayed and wrote here. Truman Capote once told Johnny Carson he was born in the hotel. He wasn't, but his mother was staying here during her pregnancy. In 1999 the Friends of the Library Association declared it an official Literary Landmark, an honor shared by only two other American hotels: the Plaza and the Algonquin in New York. The Carousel Bar, installed in 1949, is an actual carousel — 25 seats revolving on 2,000 steel rollers, pulled by a chain and a quarter-horsepower motor. One full revolution every fifteen minutes. It's open to non-guests. No cover. You can walk in off Royal Street, order a drink, and ride the thing while the French Quarter stands still around you.