The Man Who Rebuilt Jackson Square
If you've ever stood in Jackson Square and looked at the St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo, and the Presbytere—the buildings that define the most photographed vista in New Orleans—you're looking at the work of one man's wallet. Don Andrés Almonaster y Rojas was a Spanish notary who arrived in colonial New Orleans with modest credentials and proceeded to fund the reconstruction of virtually every important public building in the city. Without him, the French Quarter as we know it simply wouldn't exist.
Almonaster was born in Spain in 1724 and came to Louisiana in 1769, part of the wave of Spanish administrators who arrived after France ceded the colony. He started as a notary public—a position that, in the Spanish colonial system, was considerably more powerful and lucrative than it sounds. Through his notarial work and shrewd land investments, Almonaster accumulated an enormous fortune.
Then, on Good Friday 1788, New Orleans burned. The fire destroyed more than 850 buildings, including the St. Louis Church, the Cabildo (the seat of government), and much of the infrastructure that made the city function. It was a catastrophe that could have destroyed New Orleans permanently.
Almonaster opened his wallet. At the then-staggering cost of $114,000—a fortune in the eighteenth century—he funded the reconstruction of the buildings that would define the city's civic identity. The St. Louis Cathedral, dedicated in 1794, rose from the ashes of the old church. The Cabildo went up beside it. He funded a charity hospital, a public school, hospital buildings, a boys' school, a chapel for the Ursulines, and a leper hospital. The man essentially rebuilt the public infrastructure of New Orleans out of his own pocket.
His motivations were probably a mix of genuine philanthropy and social ambition—the charitable works earned him a knighthood in the Order of Charles III in 1796, and his status in the city rose with every building he funded. But whatever drove him, the results speak for themselves. The three buildings facing Jackson Square—the Cathedral, the Cabildo, and the Presbytere—are the architectural heart of New Orleans, and they exist because one wealthy Spaniard decided to rebuild them.
Almonaster died in 1798 and is buried inside the St. Louis Cathedral he paid for—one of the few people ever interred within its walls. His daughter Micaela Almonaster would become the Baroness Pontalba, who would later build the iconic Pontalba Buildings flanking Jackson Square. Father and daughter, between them, created the physical framework of the most important public space in the city.
Almonaster Avenue in New Orleans bears his name, but the real monument is standing right there in the Quarter—the Cathedral, the Cabildo, the whole magnificent ensemble that every tourist photographs and every local takes for granted. One man paid for all of it. His name was Andrés Almonaster y Rojas, and New Orleans owes him more than it knows.
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