Algiers

Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite the Vieux Carré, was annexed by New Orleans in 1870. In the eighteenth century it was the site of the Company of the Indies’s first plantation, Louisiana’s first slave-trading depot, and New Orleans’s gunpowder magazines. In the nineteenth century, dry docks and shipbuilding brought prosperity to the town and after 1853, when the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western Railroad (later the Southern Pacific) arrived, it became a center for freight transportation via steamship and rail from the Eastern Seaboard to the West Coast until the 1960s. Pacific and Atlantic streets were named to commemorate that trade. The older section of Algiers, known as Algiers Point, was rebuilt after a fire in 1895, primarily with small cottages and shotgun houses, many elaborately decorated with Eastlake ornament, as along the 200 block of Olivier Street. Construction of the Mississippi River bridge (now with a duplicate span of 1988 and known as the Crescent City Connection) in 1958 made Algiers more accessible to east-bank New Orleanians and triggered new suburban development. Algiers has two small Beaux-Arts classical buildings: a Carnegie-funded public library (725 Pelican Avenue), designed in 1907 by Rathbone DeBuys, and the former Canal Commercial Trust and Savings Bank (505 Patterson Road) of 1907 by Emile Weil. The small, frame Mount Olivet Episcopal Church (526 Pelican Avenue) dates to 1854. A ferry, operating since 1827, continues to link Algiers Point with Canal Street and provides spectacular views of both banks of the river and of downtown New Orleans.