That building on the corner of Bourbon and Saint Philip — the one that looks like it's been slowly returning to the earth? That's Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar. It claims to be the oldest bar in America. It is not.
Let's start with what's real. The building is genuinely old — probably seventeen seventies, during the Spanish colonial period. It's made using a French technique called briquette-entre-poteaux — soft bricks packed between cypress timber posts. You can see the exposed brick and wood if you look closely. It survived both great fires that destroyed most of the French Quarter — seventeen eighty-eight and seventeen ninety-four — reportedly because of its slate roof.
Now let's talk about what's not real. There is zero evidence in the property records that Jean Lafitte ever owned, operated, or set foot in this building. The ownership chain goes from a carpenter named Bartholomie Roberts in seventeen seventy-three to his heirs, with no Lafitte anywhere. In eighteen seventy-nine,
a historian pointed out something awkward. There was a completely different, unrelated blacksmith named Lafitte working in New Orleans at the same time. The whole legend may be a two-hundred-year-old case of mistaken identity.
The building was never documented as a blacksmith shop, either. Before it became a bar, it was a residence, a workshop, and — I promise this is true — an ice cream parlor.
