Old Absinthe House circa 1950s
I think the above photo might have originally been a postcard; all I have is the scanned version and I haven’t been able to locate the original, but if you look closely, you can see a weave pattern that would’ve been consistent with an older postcard.
The building sits at the corner of Bienville & Bourbon, and, built in 1806, it began operating as a coffee house and saloon in 1815. It didn’t became famous until 1874, when their ‘mixologist’ Cayetano Ferrer invented the absinthe frappe.
The drink was favored in particular by artists, and, according the their website:
Many celebrities have been welcomed through our doors in the nearly two centuries since its opening — including Oscar Wilde, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Jenny Lind, Enrico Caruso, General Robert E Lee, Franklin Roosevelt, Liza Minelli and Frank Sinatra.
The place went through a long, rough period, starting with the banning of absinthe in 1912- 8 years before the start of Prohibition. Although the bar was broken into and ransacked, the bar itself was saved and kept in a warehouse, not to be returned to its original home until 2004.
This is another eBay slide, marked as being from the early 1960s:
I love the detail in it- the older people in their hats, the old Bourbon Street sign, the Bus Stop pole (there haven’t been buses in the Quarter in decades). The place has been spiffed up a bit since then, but you can still see the funky charm underneath.
And now history’s come full circle and now that absinthe is again legal, you can go sit at the worn bar and vegetate with a cold Absinthe and watch the world go by outside those huge wooden doors.
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July 10th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Actually, there was a shuttle, the Vieux Carré, that made a loop through the Quarter and the CBD, basically from the Convention Center to Washington Park, through at least the ’90s and possibly until Katrina. It was small bus made to look sort of like the St. Charles streetcar. In the Quarter it went down Chartres (detouring to Decatur around Jackson Square) and back up on Dauphine. Now that I’m remembering, when NOCCA opened, that became it’s southern endpoint.
Anyway, love the photos.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Thanks for the correction- I didn’t realize those little bus-lets were run by the city, and didn’t even think to include them!
July 16th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
You’re not so far off. There was a similar bus-let (love that term) that belonged to a hotel and ran through the Quarter.