Jackson Square

Jackson Square, is a historic park in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1960. In 2012 the American Planning Association designated Jackson Square as a one of America’s Great Public Spaces. Jackson Square was designed after the famous 17th-century Place des Vosges in Paris, France, by the architect and landscape architect Louis H. Pilié. Jackson Square is roughly the size of a city block (GPS +29.95748 -090.06310). Sculptor Clark Mills's statue of Battle of New Orleans hero and future U.S. President Andrew Jackson, for whom the square was named in 1815, was erected in 1856. Iron fences, walkways, benches, and Parisian-style landscaping remain intact from the original design by Baroness Micaela Almonester-Pontalba in 1851. The popular pedestrian mall area around the Square was created when three surrounding streets — Chartres, St. Peter, and St. Ann — were closed (1971). The flagpole, commemorating the city's transfer from Spain to France to the United States in 1803, symbolizes the square's rich cultural history. Throughout the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) repainted facades, renovated surrounding buildings, and improved landscaping around the square.  From the 1920s through the 1980s the square was famous as a gathering place of painters of widely varying talents, including proficient professionals, talented young art students, amateurs, and caricaturists. While still a site for artists and musicians, in the early 1990s the square became popular among tarot card readers. They began to tell fortunes on St. Peter and St. Ann streets. Chartres Street, in front of Saint Louis Cathedral, the Presbytère and the Cabildo, is shared by tourists and artists, musicians and varied street performers, such as jugglers and magicians.