Prytania Street and The Rink Historic Market

Why is it significant?

Arrive at the charming timber corner of Prytania and Washington Avenue, anchored by The Rink. Constructed in 1884 to designs by architect Arthur Neill, this expansive wooden building was originally built as the Crescent City Skating Rink to provide recreational roller-skating for visitors attending…

Key Facts

Open the walk

Arrive at the charming timber corner of Prytania and Washington Avenue, anchored by The Rink. Constructed in 1884 to designs by architect Arthur Neill, this expansive wooden building was originally built as the Crescent City Skating Rink to provide recreational roller-skating for visitors attending the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884 in nearby Audubon Park.

Roller-skating was a national craze in the Gilded Age, and The Rink was New Orleans premier indoor sporting venue, featuring a pristine polished maple skating floor, private spectator balconies, and a live orchestra that accompanied skaters with waltzes and polkas beneath fluttering bunting. During the 1884 Cotton Centennial, thousands of international visitors arrived on the Saint Charles streetcars to skate across the gleaming pine floors under illuminated gas chandeliers, celebrating New Orleans post-Civil War commercial rebirth. The exterior exhibits distinctive Queen Anne wooden brackets, weatherboard siding, and decorative dormer windows that blend seamlessly into the residential streetscape. Inside, sunlight streams through high clerestory windows onto cozy book nooks, inviting visitors to linger over local literature and regional histories.

As the roller-skating craze waned in the twentieth century, the building was adapted into a livery stable for carriage horses, a mortuary garage for horse-drawn funeral hearses, and later a local grocery market. In the 1970s, visionary preservationists rehabilitated the cavernous wooden interior into an intimate neighborhood shopping hall, exposing massive heart-pine timber ceiling trusses, tongue-and-groove wooden wall paneling, and clerestory skylights. Today, The Rink houses the Garden District Book Shop, one of the South's most celebrated independent literary destinations, famously associated with novelist Anne Rice, who held midnight book signings here for her international bestselling Vampire Chronicles series.

Walking inside beneath the arched timber rafters, the aroma of old books and freshly brewed coffee creates a wonderfully welcoming neighborhood sanctuary. The building demonstrates how New Orleans creatively repurposes its historic wooden architecture into thriving cultural spaces.

Cross Washington Avenue to the historic wrought-iron gates of Lafayette Cemetery No. 1.