Chartres Street in the Old French Quarter, New Orleans, LA, 1935

About this postcard

The view looks down Chartres Street in the Vieux Carré, with the twin spires of St. Louis Cathedral rising beyond the low Creole buildings at the end of the block. Wrought-iron balconies and galleries line the right-hand facades, and an automobile stands in the roadway. Chartres Street is one of the old French Quarter's oldest thoroughfares; the printed caption notes that horses, carriages, automobiles, and enslaved people passed along it over more than two centuries. St. Louis Cathedral, on Jackson Square, stands on the site of the Mississippi Valley's first church and is the oldest continuously active Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States. The surrounding French Quarter retains much of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century street grid.