French Market

This guide to the French Market in New Orleans starts with an 1819 diary entry from architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who counted roughly five hundred sellers and buyers packed onto a muddy riverside ridge. It traces the market back to Choctaw traders who worked this same high ground long before the Spanish made it official in 1791, and follows the site through a hurricane in 1812 and a catastrophic flood in 1849. Both disasters emptied the levee for a time, and both times vendors came back to rebuild on ground the river kept trying to reclaim.