Lafayette Square

This guide to Lafayette Square in New Orleans starts with an absence: the ornamental iron fence that once ringed this lawn, melted down for scrap during the First World War along with fences from parks across the city. It turns to the bronze statues that took the fence's place, including Henry Clay, moved here in 1900 after his statue spent four decades snarling streetcar traffic at Canal and Royal, and Benjamin Franklin, added in the early 1900s and still standing in a bed of African iris. Walk the diagonal paths toward Camp Street to see where each one stands.