Audubon Riverfront Plaza and Steamboat Natchez Landing
Why is it significant?
Step onto the broad brick esplanade of the Audubon Riverfront Plaza, where the rhythmic chuff of steam pistons and the melodious notes of a thirty-two-whistle calliope fill the river air.
Key Facts
| Place | Audubon Riverfront Plaza and Steamboat Natchez Landing |
|---|---|
| Address | 400 Toulouse St, New Orleans, LA 70130, United States |
| Geo Coordinates | 29.95380, -90.06250 |
| Part of Walk | French Quarter, Creole Townhouses and Mississippi Riverfront: The Heart of New Orleans |
| Generated | Generated |
Step onto the broad brick esplanade of the Audubon Riverfront Plaza, where the rhythmic chuff of steam pistons and the melodious notes of a thirty-two-whistle calliope fill the river air. Here at the Toulouse Street Wharf berths the Steamboat Natchez, the last authentic sternwheel paddle steamboat operating on the lower Mississippi River, preserving two centuries of steam navigation heritage.
Steamboats revolutionized American commerce when the New Orleans, engineered by Robert Fulton and Nicholas Roosevelt, first completed the perilous voyage downriver from Pittsburgh in January 1812. By the 1850s, more than three thousand steamboats arrived in New Orleans annually, transforming the city into the fourth-largest shipping port in the world and creating immense cotton and sugar fortunes.
The current Steamboat Natchez was constructed in 1975 using genuine vintage components: her steam engines were originally cast in 1925 for the steel towboat Clairton, and her authentic steam whistle was salvaged from a vanished luxury packet boat that sank in the Monongahela River. High above her top deck sits the brass calliope, an instrument powered by pressurized steam that steam captains historically played to announce their arrival to plantation towns miles upriver. On the plaza stands the Monument to the Immigrant, a monumental marble sculpture carved in 1995 by Franco Alessandrini, depicting an immigrant family looking out over the waters where millions of Irish, German, and Sicilian newcomers arrived throughout the nineteenth century to build modern New Orleans.
Watching the giant red paddlewheel churn the river into white spray while the steam whistle shrieks a salute to passing tugs transports you directly into the riverboat era of Mark Twain. The sheer romance of Mississippi steam navigation remains gloriously alive at this river pier.
Turn inland toward the historic Bienville Monument on Decatur Street.