For sixty years the French Opera House at Bourbon and Toulouse was where Creole New Orleans came to be itself. Four tiers, eighteen hundred seats, boxes filled each season with the families that still spoke French and still regarded Paris as the center of civilization. American premieres of Massenet, Gounod, Saint-Saëns. The grand Mardi Gras balls of the old-line krewes. Debut singers arrived from Paris; the orchestra, in its best years, was among the finest in the country.
December 4, 1919. A fire between performances. The building burned to the ground in hours. Nobody died, but by 1919 Creole New Orleans was already losing its language to assimilation, and the Opera House had been one of the last places where that world ran on its own terms. Prohibition arrived the following month. The Four Points by Sheraton French Quarter is on the corner now. A plaque marks the site.
What stood here
3 surviving images.
French Opera House, New Orleans, no. 53528, 1900
* Postcard series number: 8380 Last series bearing Detroit Photographic Company imprint, 1898
Postcard view of New Orleans, with two photos: Lee Monument at Lee Circle at left; French Opera House, right, 1900