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Eagle Saloon site is important to N.O. jazz history [1]

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Date: 2025-07-23

A location that began as a pawn shop eventually became a jazz landmark.

“The building at the corner of South Rampart and Perdido streets housed the Eagle Saloon, a base for the community of musicians that gave rise to jazz from 1908 through the 1910s,” WWOZ’s A Closer Walk states. “In addition to the dances inside the building, brass bands regularly played on the corner outside for funeral processions.”

Built in 1850, the three-story brick and stucco commercial building first housed Eagle Loan Office. According to the National Park Service, musicians sold their instruments at the office between their gigs. The owner moved to Canal Street and Eagle Saloon opened in 1908.

A building near the saloon housed the Odd Fellows and Masonic Hall.

“In 1897, an association of Black chapters of two fraternal organizations, the Odd Fellows and the Masons, rented the three-story building on Perdido Street along with the the third floor of the adjacent Eagle Saloon building,” A Close Walk states. “The association hired dance bands to play in its ballroom.”

Those bands featured cornetist Buddy Bolden and violinist John Robichaux.

“Bolden, who was African American, played by ear, drawing on the blues and the music of Protestant churches,” A Closer Walk states. “Robichaux, who was Afro Creole, used his formal training to play written compositions in a smoother style. Jazz emerged as a synthesis of their approaches.”

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Eagle Saloon building still stands today, but it has been falling apart for decades. Attempts to restore the building, owned by the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame, have stalled.

“There are no other buildings,” Offbeat Magazine states, “no other locations in New Orleans that are so historic and so important to the history of jazz in this country.”



For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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