Congo Square, New Orleans

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An open ground on the far side of Rampart Street from the French Quarter, in what is now Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé, where enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sunday afternoons to drum, dance, sing and trade. Under French and Spanish rule enslaved people in Louisiana had customary Sunday time off; after the Louisiana Purchase the city moved to control rather than abolish the practice, and in 1817 a municipal decree confined such gatherings to this single plot. That is the paradox the site records: the same order that restricted the gatherings licensed them, so drumming survived in New Orleans, legally and in public, at a time when it was proscribed elsewhere in the United States. Contemporary observers describe crowds numbering in the hundreds by 1819 and name the instruments and dances, among them the bamboula and its associated pattern counted as three plus three plus two — the asymmetric timeline that runs through Caribbean and later New Orleans music. The gatherings continued into the mid-nineteenth century. Congo Square is not the birthplace of jazz, a claim it is frequently made to carry; it is documentary evidence that African ensemble practice was still being performed in North America within living memory of the people who made jazz.