Great New Orleans Fire (1788) - History

History

The Good Friday fire started about 1:30 p.m. at the home of Army Treasurer Don Vincente Jose Nunez, 619 Chartres Street at Toulouse Street, less than a block from Jackson Square (Plaza de Armas). Within five hours it had consumed almost the entire city as it was fed by a strong wind from the southeast. The fire destroyed the original Cabildo and virtually all major buildings in the French Quarter, including the city's main church, the municipal building, the army barracks, armory, and jail. Only two fire engines were operational, and they were destroyed by the fire. Louisiana Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró set up tents for the homeless.

The fire area stretched between Dauphine Street and the Mississippi River and between Conti Street in the south and St. Philip Street in the north. It spared the river-front buildings including the Customs House, the tobacco warehouses, the Governor's Building, the Royal Hospital and the Ursulines Convent.

The Spanish were to replace the wooden buildings with structures with courtyards, thick brick walls, arcades, and wrought iron balconies. Among the new buildings were the signature New Orleans buildings of St. Louis Cathedral, The Cabildo and the Presbytere.

Governor Miro's report summarized the suffering:

If the imagination could describe what our senses enable us to feel from sight and touch, reason itself would recoil in horror, and it is no easy matter to say whether the sight of an entire city in flames was more horrible to behold than the suffering and pitiable condition in which everyone was involved. Mothers, in search of a sanctuary or refuge for their little ones, and abandoning - their earthly goods to the greed of the relentless enemy, would retire to out-of-the-way places rather than be witnesses of their utter ruin. Fathers and husbands were busy in saving whatever objects the rapidly spreading flames would permit them to bear off, while the general bewilderment was such as to prevent them from finding even for these a place of security. The obscurity of the night coming on threw its mantle for a while over the saddening spectacle; but more horrible still was the sight, when day began to dawn, of entire families pouring forth into the public highways, yielding to their lamentations and despair, who, but a few hours before, had been basking in the enjoyment of more than the ordinary comforts of life. The tears, the heartbreaking sobs and the pallid faces of the wretched people mirrored the dire fatality that had overcome a city, now in ruins, transformed within the space of five hours into an arid and fearful, desert. Such was the sad ending of a work of death, the result of seventy years of industry.

After 6 years of rebuilding, on December 8, 1794, another 212 buildings were destroyed in the Great New Orleans Fire of 1794. Still a colony of Spain, rebuilding continued in Spanish style, and most French style architecture was eliminated from the French Quarter.