The St. Charles Hotel

in New Orleans was, when it opened in 1837, one of America’s first grand luxury hotels, along with Boston’s Tremont House (1829) and New York’s Astor House (1836). It was destroyed twice by fire, in 1851 and again in 1894, and was finally demolished in 1974. In the years before the Civil War its bar was an icon not only of New Orleans drinking but of Southern drinking in general, in ways both inspiring and repugnant.

The hotel’s first iteration (1837–1851) was distinguished by the dome over the center of the building, on St. Charles Avenue in the heart of the city’s American Quarter. Beneath the dome was the hotel’s grand “saloon,” airy and round. This was in fact the hotel’s lobby, although it had a small bar attached to it, and one could drink and eat at the tables there. The main bar, however, was directly underneath: “The bar-room in the basement was … octagonal in shape, seventy feet in diameter and twenty feet high, having an exterior circle of Ionic columns,” as one observer described it. There, as New Yorker Oakley Hall wrote in 1842, could “be seen hundreds of steady, conscientious lovers of lunches and liquors going and returning, or clustering by pillar and column in social merriment” enjoying “the juleps, and punches, and nogs” served from the bar in the middle of the room. That lunch was free—in fact, the St. Charles’s free lunch, recorded as early as 1840, may be the first on record. The bar was “capable of accommodating from four to five hundred persons without inconvenience.”The bar was known for the skill of its bartenders. As the Daily Delta noted in 1850, “Colonel” T. L. Craft, the hotel’s head bartender, “discovered a cocktail, which is a compound of incomparable delicacy and richness,” while the St. Charles Punch, with port wine, brandy, and lemon, was included in the 1862 first edition of Jerry Thomas’s book and went on to be something of a bar staple. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”. When the hotel was rebuilt after its first fire, the “large and fine” bar was, as Gleason’s Pictorial magazine reported, “much like its far-famed predecessor.” Its marble bar covered three sides of the octagon.

One of the things the bar was famous for was its Saturday night slave auctions, when a pair of auction blocks would be dragged into the room and placed at each end of the marble bar. One was for men and boys, the other for women and girls, who were sold to the highest bidder as the customers drank, commented, and pawed the unfortunate human chattel. Albert Deane Richardson, who witnessed several auctions there in 1861, pronounced them “the most utterly revolting spectacle that I have ever looked upon.”

Auctions continued in the bar after the Civil War, but they were of real estate, not human beings. The bar remained one of New Orleans’s most prominent, but as the century wore on, it was gradually eclipsed by Santini’s, the Sazerac, Henry Ramos’s, and the Old Absinthe House. See Old Absinthe House; Ramos, Henry Charles; and Sazerac House. However, the hotel during this era also featured a bar known as Parlor P, which was “one of the great political centers outside of Washington,” and a regular meeting place of social clubs and horse-racing enthusiasts in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1889, noted New Orleans bar operator Leon Lamothe took over the operation of the main bar, restoring it to splendor, but he died in 1891, and the bar burned with the rest of the hotel three years later.

During its third and final iteration, which began in 1896, the hotel boasted many eating and drinking establishments. There was the bar itself, now reduced to a fairly small room in the basement. But there was also the Salon de Danse, which offered beer and highballs, and the Italian Garden, which offered an extensive cocktail list. The St. Charles Bar was refurbished after Repeal; it was described in 1938 as “among the oldest and best-known bars in the city,” known for the “wide variety of drinks … served, especial pride being taken in its ‘Planter’s Punch’ and ‘Old Fashioned’ cocktail.” Unfortunately, the hotel did not survive to serve them again in the 2000s.

“Exchange Hotel.” New Orleans Daily Picayune, February 9, 1837, 2.

Goss [pseud.]. “Those Lunches.” New Orleans Daily Picayune, December 25, 1840, 2.

Hall, A. Oakey. A Manhattaner in New Orleans. New York: 1850.

“The New St. Charles Hotel.” Gleason’s Pictorial, July 16, 1853, 1.

Richardson, Albert D. The Secret Service. Hartford, CT: 1865.

Richey, Emma Cecilia, and Evelina Prescott Kean. The New Orleans Book. New Orleans: Searcy & Pfaff, 1919.

By: Philip Greene and David WondrichSee Thomas, Jeremiah P.See [Old Absinthe House; Ramos, Henry Charles;, Sazerac House.