Apartments fit for a baroness
Jackson Square—with the famous St. Louis Cathedral at the back and the perhaps more famous Café Du Monde at the front—is the white-hot center of tourism in New Orleans. However, hiding in plain sight are some less known but more interesting stories about its history. If you look up at the long brick buildings on St. Peter and St. Ann Streets on either side of the square, you can make out the letters AP in the striking wrought-iron design along the second- and third-floor verandas. The monogram signifies the two families Almonester and Pontalba, once the wealthiest in Louisiana.
Micaela Almonester (1795–1874) was the only child of one of the oldest Creole families in New Orleans. When her father died in 1798, she became the sole heir to his fortune. Micaela was married to her cousin, Xavier Celestin Delfau de Pontalba, when she was 15. Xavier’s father, the baron Joseph Delfau de Pontalba, constantly schemed (unsuccessfully) to acquire his daughter-in-law’s fortune. Infuriated by her resistance, he confronted Micaela and shot her four times with a pistol. She lost two of her fingers and was maimed in the chest, but did not die. The baron, however, committed suicide.
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Address 700 Decatur Street, New Orleans, LA 70116 | Tip In 1856, Baroness Pontalba provided funding for the square’s statue of Andrew Jackson on his horse. It’s little known that the artist, Clark Mills, created three more identical ones, for Washington, DC, Nashville, and Jacksonville, FL. Legend has it that New Orleans’ Jackson tips his hat directly at Apartment Number 5, on the St. Peter-St side, where the Baroness Pontalba lived.
More than a survivor, Micaela became an Oprah-like force of nature. She left Xavier and then almost single-handedly cleaned up the slum that had become the Place d’Armes at the city’s center. For $300,000 she constructed the two new Parisian-style rowhouses known today as the Pontalba buildings. She then led the campaign to rename the square after Andrew Jackson, to appeal to the influx of Americans and, not coincidentally, to raise the value of her real estate.
At one point, the famous opera singer Jenny Lind stayed as a guest in one of the Pontalba apartments. Ever the entrepreneur, Micaela predated eBay by 200 years when she auctioned off everything the singing sensation had sat on or walked across.
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