The oldest bar in New Orleans

Two on Bourbon Street, one round the corner

The walk takes about a quarter of an hour at a stroll and the three rooms could hardly be less alike. Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop is a low French-colonial cottage at 941 Bourbon, up at the quiet end, and is lit largely by candles once it is dark. The Old Absinthe House is seven hundred metres down the same street at number 240, on the corner of Bienville, and is the loud one — one street, two ends of a reputation. Napoleon House is five minutes from the Absinthe House and one street over, on the corner of Chartres and St Louis, where the Pimm’s Cup is the house drink and the house says it was the first in America to pour one; it takes no reservations. Two of the three are individually National Historic Landmarks, both designated in 1970 — Lafitte’s cottage, and Napoleon House under its other name, the Mayor Girod House. The Old Absinthe House has no entry of its own: it stands inside the Vieux Carré Historic District, which is a district designation and describes no individual building.

Three claims, two groceries and one advertisement

The Old Absinthe House has the earliest record of drink sold of the three, and it is a modest one: a stuccoed corner building of 1798 to 1806, which the bar itself dates to 1806; a ground floor that began as a grocery; a bar there by roughly the 1830s; and an advertisement under the Absinthe House name in 1869. What made it famous came after that — the absinthe frappé poured by the bartender Cayetano Ferrer in the 1870s. The Jackson and Lafitte meeting upstairs went as far as a courtroom in 1951, when a rival house on Chartres Street sued over the right to display the plaque, and the court treated the meeting as legend. Napoleon House is the reverse case: the best-documented building of the three and the latest trade. The National Park Service dates its two-storey section to 1794, built by Claude François Girod, and the three-storey corner to 1814, built by his brother Nicolas during his first term as mayor; the bar’s own account says 1797. The earliest dated record of drinking there anybody has opened is the National Register nomination of 15 July 1975, which notes a bar and grill on the first floor and apartments above — on a form that gives the address as 504 Chartres, where everything since has said 500.

The building the federal survey dates half a century later

Lafitte’s is the one visitors are sent to, and the gap between its claim and its record is the widest of the three. The cottage is a rare survival of briquette-entre-poteaux work — soft brick between cypress uprights, plastered outside against the rain — nearly square, four equal rooms originally, with a flared hipped roof and pedimented dormers. The bar dates it 1722 to 1732 and the 1968 survey dates it 1772 to 1791. Under present use, in 1968, that survey recorded one word: bar. It had been one since the mid-1940s, when Tom Caplinger opened Café Lafitte in it, and the candlelight is a large part of why the legend survives. None of that makes the house young; it makes the house older than the business inside it, which is the commonest shape of claim on this site and is explained in how to tell how old a pub is. The national argument these three take part in is set out in what is the oldest bar in America, the wider list is at the oldest bars in the USA, and the grading is in the methodology.