See that building taking up half the block on Royal Street? That's the Hotel Monteleone. It's the only high-rise in the interior French Quarter, and the man who built it repaired shoes for a living.
Antonio Monteleone arrived from Sicily around eighteen eighty and set up a cobbler's shop on this street. He started buying property — a lot here, a building there. By eighteen eighty-six, he had a sixty-four-room hotel. Rooms cost a dollar a night. He kept acquiring the buildings around it and absorbing them. By nineteen oh-eight, it was two hundred and twenty rooms with private baths, electric lights, and fireproofing. That last part mattered — just about every other hotel in New Orleans had burned down at some point.
Today, five generations later, the Monteleone family still runs it. Five hundred and seventy rooms. Antonio kept his cobbler's bench in a storage room behind the lobby for the rest of his life. His son Frank tried to move it out once. Antonio had it brought back the next d
ay.
Go inside. You're here for the Carousel Bar.
It's exactly what it sounds like — a circular bar with twenty-five stools that slowly revolves around stationary bartenders in the middle. The whole thing has been spinning since nineteen forty-nine on two thousand large steel rollers. One bicycle chain. One motor with a quarter horsepower — less than a kitchen blender. It's been turning those bar
