On a Sunday afternoon in Tremé, you hear the brass before you see it: a sousaphone bass line bouncing off shotgun cottages, a snare drum dragging the whole block into step. A second line rounds the corner past a pink Creole cottage, umbrellas tipping, sneakers shuffling on the banquette. This is the oldest Black neighborhood in America, and the Creoles in Tremé have been making this exact sound, on these exact streets, for two hundred years.
Tremé sits just behind the French Quarter and its French founders, close enough to walk, far enough to be its own world. For most of its life it has been the address of New Orleans’ free people of color, the gens de couleur libres, a French-speaking, Catholic, property-owning society that existed nowhere else in the slaveholding South at the scale it reached here. The neighborhood’s story is the story of how that world built itself, what was taken from it, and what is still rolling down Claiborne Avenue on a Sunday.
Tremé: The Place
Tremé runs roughly from Esplanade Avenue on its downriver edge to North Broad Street toward the lake, bounded by North Rampart Street on the Quarter side and St. Louis Street on the other. It covers about two-thirds of a square mile of low, flat ground that was swamp and plantation before it was streets. The housing is classic New Orleans: Creole cottages and shotgun doubles, brightly painted, set right at the sidewalk. Armstrong Park and the I-10 overpass both cut through it, and the French Quarter is a five-minute walk across Rampart.
How Tremé Became Creole New Orleans
Before the Creoles
The land began as plantation. By the late 1700s it belonged to the Morand family, and a hatter and real estate man named Claude Tremé, who had arrived from France, came to own it. In 1810 Tremé sold the tract to the city, which surveyed it into blocks and lots and called the new suburb Faubourg Tremé, French for the Tremé suburb.
What made the place unusual was who bought in. Spanish and French colonial law allowed enslaved people to purchase their own freedom and to own property, and free people of color did both, lot by lot, decade by decade. The Haitian Revolution sent thousands of refugees to New Orleans in the early 1800s, many of them free, mixed-race, French-speaking, and Catholic, and a great number settled in and around the new faubourg.
The Creoles Arrive
By 1841, free people of color owned an estimated 80 percent of the property in Tremé. They were skilled and propertied: cigar makers, bricklayers, carpenters, ironworkers, tailors, teachers, and musicians. Some grew genuinely wealthy. The merchant tailor Francois Lacroix held a real estate portfolio worth more than $200,000 by 1861, a fortune worth millions today.
Families bought adjoining lots and held them across generations. The Cheval family owned property on Dumaine Street from 1831 into the 1870s; the Perrault and Toutant families held lots along Ursulines. This was not a few exceptional individuals but an entire society, with its own newspapers, churches, benevolent societies, and schools, operating inside a state where most Black people were enslaved.
Tremé at Its Peak
The Creole Tremé of the nineteenth century was a center of Black intellectual and political life unlike anywhere else in the South. The New Orleans Tribune, the first Black daily newspaper in the United States, launched in 1864, published in both French and English by Louis Charles Roudanez and drawing on the community of free people of color in Tremé and the neighboring faubourgs.
It was also where jazz was being assembled, note by note. Just across Rampart Street, enslaved and free Africans had gathered for generations at Congo Square to drum and dance. By the turn of the century, Creole musicians trained in European technique were meeting that African rhythmic tradition in the dance halls and parlors of Tremé and the adjacent district, and something new came out of the collision.
The red-light district of Storyville sat right at Tremé’s Rampart Street edge from 1897 to 1917, its saloons and dance halls giving early jazz players steady work a short walk from home. The Creole clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, born into a French-speaking Creole family in 1897, came up in exactly this world before carrying New Orleans jazz to Paris and the world.
The Change
The wound that Tremé residents still name first is Claiborne Avenue. For generations its wide neutral ground was a canopy of live oaks, the social and commercial spine of Black New Orleans, lined with well over a hundred Black-owned businesses. People called it the place where the community gathered, shopped, and paraded.
In 1966 the state began clearing the oaks, more than two hundred of them, to build the elevated Interstate 10 down the center of the avenue. The expressway opened in 1968. Around 500 homes were cleared and the businesses scattered; where the oaks had stood, concrete pillars now hold up the highway. Residents had not been consulted, and there had been no real hearing.
Armstrong Park added insult. In the 1960s and 70s the city demolished a section of Tremé housing to build the park around Congo Square, displacing families in the process. Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which flooded the neighborhood, and the slow churn of rebuilding that followed. The blocks that came back came back changed.
The Landmarks of Tremé
Congo Square, in Louis Armstrong Park, North Rampart Street between St. Ann and St. Peter. Under French and Spanish rule, enslaved Africans were generally given Sundays free, and an 1817 city ordinance funneled their gatherings to this one open ground. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, met here weekly to drum on bamboula drums, dance, and trade, keeping African musical traditions alive in North America when almost nowhere else permitted it. Many scholars trace the deepest roots of jazz to this square.
St. Augustine Catholic Church, 1210 Governor Nicholls Street. Established in 1841 and dedicated in 1842, St. Augustine is widely called the oldest African-American Catholic parish in the country. As it opened, free people of color quietly bought up pews, and when white residents tried to outbid them, the gens de couleur libres bought three pews to every one and all the side aisles too, a contest the parish remembers as the War of the Pews. In its garden stands the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, a cross of heavy chain honoring the enslaved who died unnamed.
The New Orleans Tribune. The first Black daily newspaper in the United States rose in 1864 from the Creole community of Tremé and the neighboring faubourgs, the work of Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez. Bilingual in French and English, it pressed for suffrage, integrated schools and streetcars, and the rights of the newly freed, publishing more than a thousand issues before it folded in 1868.
1108 North Claiborne Avenue, the home of Homer Plessy. The shoemaker Homer Plessy, a Tremé Creole born in 1862, lived on this stretch of Claiborne. Recruited by the Comite des Citoyens, a committee of mixed-race New Orleanians organized to challenge segregation, he boarded a whites-only rail car on June 7, 1892. His arrest became Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that enshrined separate but equal for the next half century.
The Backstreet Cultural Museum, 1531 St. Philip Street. Sylvester Francis began photographing jazz funerals and second lines and displaying Mardi Gras Indian suits in his garage in 1988, formally founding the museum in 1999. It holds what may be the most complete collection anywhere of New Orleans Black masking and processional culture. Francis died in 2020, and his daughter Dominique Dilling-Francis carries the museum on at its current St. Philip Street address.
The Candlelight Lounge, 925 North Robertson Street. One of the last neighborhood music rooms in Tremé, the Candlelight has hosted the Tremé Brass Band on its regular nights, the kind of small, smoky room where the tradition is handed down in person rather than in a museum case. The Tremé Brass Band itself was formed around 1990 by drummer Benny Jones Sr. out of jam sessions at a neighborhood saloon, and it remains a keeper of the old parade style.
Where the Tremé Creoles Came From
The free people of color who built Tremé came from several streams that met in New Orleans. The oldest were Louisiana-born, the descendants of unions among French and Spanish colonists, enslaved and free Africans, and Native peoples, who over generations formed a distinct French-speaking, Catholic Creole society with its own customs and class structure. This is a different French Louisiana from the rural one of the Cajuns around Lafayette: Creole New Orleans was urban, Catholic, and racially layered in ways the prairie was not.
The other great current came from the Caribbean, above all from Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. The revolution there from 1791 to 1804 sent waves of refugees to New Orleans, many of them free people of color who arrived with skills, French, Catholicism, and in some cases capital. They reinforced and enlarged the Creole world already forming in the faubourg, the same Haitian thread that runs through the wider Gulf story you can trace from the Haitian community of Little Haiti in Miami to the older French Caribbean presence across the South.
Tremé Today
Tremé is changing, and no one there pretends otherwise. The neighborhood that was more than 90 percent Black in 2010 had shifted markedly by 2020, as higher property values and post-Katrina rebuilding drew new, often whiter and wealthier residents. The HBO series Tremé, which premiered in 2010 and ran through 2013, put the neighborhood’s name and music in front of the world, with all the attention and pressure that brings.
But the culture is not in a museum case, or not only there. Second lines still roll on Sunday afternoons during the parading season, sponsored by the social aid and pleasure clubs that have organized this community for more than a century. The Backstreet Cultural Museum still opens its doors, the Candlelight still books brass bands, and St. Augustine still rings its bell over the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.
What endures in Tremé is not nostalgia but practice, a set of living traditions carried by the families who never left and the ones determined to stay. The drums that first sounded in Congo Square two centuries ago are still being answered, every Sunday, a few blocks away.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Creoles settle in Tremé?
When Claude Tremé’s land was subdivided after 1810, colonial law uniquely allowed free people of color and even enslaved people who bought their freedom to own property, so the Creoles in Tremé acquired lots in large numbers. Refugees from the Haitian Revolution, many of them free and French-speaking, added to that community. By 1841 free people of color owned about 80 percent of the neighborhood.
Is Tremé still a Creole and Black neighborhood today?
It is still the historic heart of Black and Creole New Orleans, but it is gentrifying. Tremé was more than 90 percent Black in 2010 and considerably less so by 2020, as rising property values and post-Katrina rebuilding brought new residents. The descendants of the Creoles in Treme, along with longtime families, churches, and second-line traditions, remain even as the demographics shift.
What are the most famous landmarks in Tremé?
Congo Square in Armstrong Park, where enslaved and free Africans gathered to drum and dance, is the most storied. St. Augustine Catholic Church, the oldest African-American Catholic parish in the country, with its Tomb of the Unknown Slave, ranks beside it, along with the Backstreet Cultural Museum and the Candlelight Lounge.
Where did the Tremé Creoles come from?
Many were Louisiana-born, descended from generations of French, Spanish, African, and Native ancestry that formed New Orleans’ distinct Creole society. A large number descended from refugees of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, free people of color who arrived French-speaking and Catholic. Together they built the gens de couleur libres community of the faubourg.
When did the Creoles in Treme first arrive?
Free people of color began acquiring property in Faubourg Tremé soon after Claude Tremé’s land was subdivided and sold to the city in 1810. Haitian refugees had been arriving in New Orleans since the 1790s and continued into the early 1800s. By 1841 the Creoles in Treme owned roughly 80 percent of the neighborhood.
If your family’s story passed through the back-of-town streets of New Orleans, through Congo Square or Claiborne Avenue or a Creole cottage in Tremé, that history is worth tracing back to the people and places it came from.