Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar

I Went Looking for America's Oldest Bar. I Found Something Better.

I originally found Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop because somebody on TripAdvisor called it one of the oldest bars in America. This was 2012, when apparently an anonymous person on TripAdvisor counted as a perfectly acceptable historical source if he told me about an old bar.

That was usually all it took anyway. I've always sought out old places, especially bars, restaurants and buildings where you can still walk through doors that generations of dead people also walked through. I live not far from the Old '76 House in New York, which has its own collection of "oldest" claims, so this particular illness has been with me for a while.

My first visit to Lafitte's was in 2012 with the woman who would later become my wife. I went back in 2015 and again in 2016 for bachelor parties. Somewhere along the way I stopped caring very much about whether Lafitte's could actually win the national championship of old bars, because by then I was going back for reasons that had nothing to do with a plaque.

What Is Lafitte's Actually Like?

Lafitte's sits toward the quieter end of Bourbon Street, which is important because Bourbon Street changes personality as you move through it. There is the bright, loud, Disney World version of Bourbon, except Disney World usually frowns on public vomiting, and then there is the end where Lafitte's sits looking like it has absolutely no intention of modernizing for anybody.

The first thing I remember noticing were the doors. They looked more like barn or stable doors than something you would expect to walk through on the way into a bar, and the building already seemed noticeably different from most of what surrounded it.

Once inside, the darkness takes over. During my visits there were no electric lights in the main bar, just candles. The bathrooms do have electricity, which is one modernization I enthusiastically support. The men's room also has no traditional urinals, just a long metal trough or sink arrangement, and this is one place where I am perfectly comfortable allowing the eighteenth century to end abruptly at the bathroom door.

During the day you can actually study the building. The beams, brick and stonework are visible enough that you start noticing the different ages of things, which becomes important once you begin asking how much of what you are looking at is actually original. At night the candles change the place completely. You don't spend as much time studying the architecture because you start feeling like you're sitting inside the history instead.

The place isn't particularly large. The bar, piano room and table areas mostly flow into one another, although they each feel slightly different. The doors stay open to the Louisiana air, which means whatever New Orleans has decided to do with heat and humidity that day is also happening inside the bar. It can be sticky, you get thirsty quickly, and fortunately somebody has constructed a business model around solving exactly that problem.

I've been in historic places where the history feels like something the marketing department found in a filing cabinet. Lafitte's never felt like that to me. A ghost tour can wander through and temporarily change the atmosphere, as can a bachelor party, and I eventually became part of the latter problem myself. Most of the time, though, the building doesn't seem like it is trying very hard to convince you that it is old. It just is.

If Someone Is Playing the Piano, I'm Probably Over There

I'm an audiophile and a music lover, so whenever somebody was playing the piano, that was usually where I wanted to be. The piano is in the room beyond the bar near the bathrooms, and you can sit right up against it while somebody plays. The top is protected from drinks, suggesting that management at some point conducted extensive research into what happens when alcohol is placed near musical instruments.

The first time my future wife and I went, it was off-season, maybe a week or two before Mardi Gras. There weren't many people around and we got seats at the piano while an older blonde woman played.

At some point she sang Tom Waits' "I Wish I Was in New Orleans."

I know saying the moment felt spiritual sounds corny, but that's how I remember it. I was sitting in a very old building lit mostly by candles, next to the woman I would eventually marry, while somebody played that particular song in New Orleans. It was also around the time I started realizing that I liked the city considerably more once I got underneath the version built specifically for tourists.

I enjoy Bourbon Street and all the ridiculousness that comes with it. There is a time and place for Hurricanes, beads and the general atmosphere of keg stands at Epcot Center. Lafitte's just never felt like part of that machinery to me. That night was probably when it stopped being an old bar I had discovered on TripAdvisor and became one of my favorite places.

I came back in 2016 for a bachelor party, which provided a much less spiritual test of the relationship. Everybody had separate flights, I was the second one to arrive, and the group assembled one person at a time at Lafitte's. During the weekend we made a surprising number of trips between Rick's strip club on the opposite end of Bourbon and Lafitte's.

There was no shortage of places between those two points where we could have spent money irresponsibly, yet we kept ending up back at Lafitte's. I think that says something about the place. It worked when I was there quietly with my future wife listening to a piano player sing Tom Waits, and it also worked during a bachelor party whose general itinerary could not have been approved by any responsible adult.

Someone Told Me I'd See Something Strange

Before that first trip, I had read an online post saying that if you hung around Lafitte's long enough at night, you were bound to see something strange. Since this was a famously haunted bar in New Orleans, I naturally assumed the writer meant a ghost.

One evening my wife and I were sitting at a table on the sidewalk, laughing and having a drink after a day of tourist stuff, when a gentleman approached wearing a cowboy hat and walking two Shetland ponies on dog leashes.

He went into Lafitte's, bought himself a Pabst Blue Ribbon, came back outside with the ponies and stood around talking to people.

I don't know who he was or what errands required the participation of two ponies and a PBR. Maybe the ponies insisted on stopping. I can only say that the prediction I had read online turned out to be accurate, although not in the way I had expected.

How Old Is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, Really?

When I first visited, I believed most of the history I had read beforehand. I thought the building dated to the early 1700s, believed Jean and Pierre Lafitte had some connection to it, and thought I was visiting one of the oldest bars in America.

Looking at the place, none of this seemed unreasonable. The beams and masonry look genuinely ancient, especially compared with some of the surrounding architecture. I don't remember a bartender giving me a history lesson, although I do remember one particularly attractive bartender who looked like she had reached her lifetime quota for tourists. Most of what I knew came from reading before I went.

Years later, when I researched Lafitte's properly for Still Open America, the dates became less cooperative.

You will frequently see the building dated somewhere around 1722 to 1732. The historical record I found does not support that very well. A more defensible range is roughly 1772 to 1791, with estate records showing that a small house stood on the site by 1781.

So the building may be several decades younger than I believed when I first walked through the door, which would be disappointing only if you think a building from the late eighteenth century somehow missed the cutoff for being old.

Living near the Old '76 House probably cured me of caring too much about these contests anyway. Spend enough time researching "oldest bar" claims and you discover everybody has invented a category they can win: oldest building with a bar in it, oldest continuously operating tavern, oldest liquor license, oldest business under the same name, oldest place where George Washington supposedly stopped for a drink and had a bowel movement. George Washington, incidentally, appears to have spent most of his adult life traveling from tavern to tavern giving future business owners something to put on a plaque.

Eventually I stopped caring about the benchmark and became much more interested in the history that actually existed within the walls.

Did Jean Lafitte Actually Have Anything to Do With the Place?

This was another story I believed when I visited. There is a portrait of Jean Lafitte hanging inside, the building is called Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, and nobody greets you at the door with a disclaimer explaining that pirate branding should not be confused with Orleans Parish property records.

Once I started researching the place, I couldn't find concrete evidence proving that Jean Lafitte owned or operated from 941 Bourbon Street.

Pierre Lafitte gets tantalizingly closer. In 1813 he received a city license to operate a butchery at the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip, which proves that Pierre Lafitte had a butchery license in the immediate area. It does not prove the brothers operated a blacksmith shop from this building, because history has a habit of producing exactly enough evidence to encourage you before becoming completely unhelpful.

The legend itself is genuinely old. By 1883, writer Lafcadio Hearn was already referring to the property as the "famed smithy" of the Lafitte brothers, which means this isn't something invented by a tourism consultant during the Clinton administration. People have associated the Lafittes with this building for a very long time.

That still doesn't make it proven.

I've become comfortable with that distinction because folklore is part of the life of an old place too. I don't think we need to throw away every good story that cannot be documented. I just want the label on the bottle to tell me what I'm drinking.

Is Lafitte's Really the Oldest Bar in America?

Probably not, mostly because an old building and an old bar business are not necessarily the same thing.

The building dates to the eighteenth century. The strongest documented modern bar history I found begins in 1933, shortly after Prohibition, when Tom Caplinger, Harold Barthel and Mary Collins leased 941 Bourbon Street and opened Café Lafitte.

That leaves a fairly large gap between the American Revolution and somebody actually documenting a bar at the address.

The building was sold in 1953, and Caplinger later opened Café Lafitte in Exile elsewhere on Bourbon Street. That history ended up being interesting in its own right. Café Lafitte became part of New Orleans nightlife and gay cultural history, and later accounts associate it with people including Tennessee Williams and Noël Coward. I couldn't verify every celebrity visit strongly enough to call each one documented, but suddenly the twentieth-century history was giving me plenty to work with without needing to claim pirates had been ordering drinks there since the 1700s.

This is one of the strange benefits of fact-checking old places. You go looking to ruin a legend and occasionally uncover better history underneath it.

So I no longer care whether Lafitte's can technically call itself America's oldest bar. The building has survived more than two centuries, the drinking establishment has a real history of its own, and people have been accumulating memories inside it for generations. The argument over who gets first place starts feeling pretty small next to that.

How Old Is the Actual Bar?

One of my favorite search questions about Lafitte's comes from people wanting to know how old the actual countertop is. This may sound overly specific until you've stood inside an eighteenth-century building and started wondering whether the thing holding your beer is also eighteenth century.

I've drunk at that bar and it is clearly old, but it never looked as old to me as the building around it. The brick wall beneath the portrait of Lafitte looks significantly older than the brick connecting that wall to the brick beneath the bar, and once you pay attention to those differences you start seeing that the room is made up of different generations.

If somebody forced me to guess based entirely on appearance, I would probably put the physical bar somewhere around the Prohibition era. I could absolutely be wrong, and I haven't found documentation establishing the age of the countertop, so my methodology here consists mostly of looking at masonry while drinking beer. I would not submit it for peer review.

What I can say is that the bar is old, well maintained and clearly not as old as some of the surrounding structure.

That is exactly what you should expect from a building that has remained useful instead of becoming a museum exhibit. Things wear out, things get replaced, masonry gets repaired and furniture eventually loses arguments with drunk people. A place can be authentic without every object inside sharing the same birthday.

I Tried the Purple Drink, Sort Of

I'm a beer drinker, which makes me poorly qualified to judge cocktails that resemble things available in the frozen-food aisle.

Lafitte's has its famous Purple Drink, and my wife ordered one. I took a sip and remember it being sweet without being unbearably sweet, and strong enough that nobody was making any serious attempt to disguise the alcohol.

It wasn't really my thing, so I returned to beer.

My wife had two, which later resulted in my escorting her home.

At the time I probably would have told you I had no interest in ordering one for myself, but these days I would try it again. Tastes change, and there is something to be said for participating in the local ritual. If you like frozen cocktails, have one. If you have two, it may be wise to identify the most structurally sound member of your party beforehand.

Is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Haunted?

This is the part where I should disclose that I am open to paranormal things. I also believe human beings are extraordinarily capable of convincing themselves that something happened, particularly when they are sitting in a dark building full of candles and alcohol.

I consider these beliefs compatible.

Lafitte's has accumulated plenty of ghost stories over the years. Jean Lafitte himself supposedly appears, there are stories involving a woman upstairs, and people have reported red eyes and unexplained figures in dark corners. I haven't found evidence that allows me to convert any of those stories into documented supernatural events.

Then there is what happened to me.

During my 2016 trip, which I never shared with my friends until now, I was sitting at the end of the piano with my right side facing toward the bathrooms. The corner in that direction was very dark, but there was a man standing there. I was aware of him throughout the performance mostly through my peripheral vision. He had some kind of hat on — not a baseball cap, more like a cowboy-style hat — and a beard. He appeared to be holding a drink, and every so often I could see him lift it. I remember him looking toward us.

Nothing about this struck me as strange at the time. I was in Lafitte's and on Bourbon Street. I assumed he was another customer standing in the corner listening to the music, because bars generally contain people standing around holding drinks and there was no reason to open an investigation.

Eventually I had to use the bathroom and turned fully in his direction.

There was nobody there.

I didn't watch him leave or notice someone walking away. I simply turned toward a corner where I had been aware of a person throughout the performance and found it empty.

I still don't know what happened. Peripheral vision is unreliable, candlelight does strange things with shadows, and beer has never been marketed as an aid to visual accuracy. Maybe somebody had been standing there and moved without me noticing. Maybe my brain assembled a man out of shadows, furniture and occasional movement.

Maybe there is another explanation.

I'm comfortable leaving it there.

What I won't do is turn "I experienced something I can't explain" into "Jean Lafitte's ghost stood next to me." If I told the story that way it would be much more exciting and considerably less honest.

That difference is basically how I approach ghost stories throughout Still Open America. Somebody can sincerely report an experience without my having to either call that person a liar or declare the supernatural explanation proven. Sometimes the answer really is that I don't know, which is frustrating because nobody has ever sold a ghost-tour ticket with the slogan "Something May or May Not Have Happened Here."

Finding Out the Truth Didn't Ruin Lafitte's

When I first walked into Lafitte's, I believed I was visiting one of America's oldest bars inside an early-1700s building connected to Jean and Pierre Lafitte. Years later, my own research told me that the building was probably younger than advertised, the Lafitte connection couldn't be proved, the eighteenth-century bar history didn't hold up, and the underground tunnel stories I had encountered were in even worse shape.

I suppose I should have felt cheated, but by then the facts I had gotten wrong were no longer the reason I cared about the place.

What I remembered was sitting at that piano with the woman I would eventually marry while an older woman sang Tom Waits. I remembered the bachelor party years later when we had an entire Bourbon Street full of places to choose from and kept wandering back to Lafitte's anyway. I remembered drinking beer at the bar, studying old brickwork during the day, sitting outside while a man bought a PBR with two Shetland ponies in his custody, and turning toward a dark corner one night to discover that the person I thought had been standing there wasn't there anymore.

None of that requires Jean Lafitte to have owned the building.

The oldest-bar claim had already done its job. It was the thing that made me curious enough to go in the first place, and once I had actually spent time there I didn't need it anymore.

That's probably why I care less about these historical beauty-pageant titles than I used to. Lafitte's has real eighteenth-century architecture, a real twentieth-century bar history, folklore that has been circulating for well over a century, music, ghosts whether real or imagined, and whatever kind of customer base produces a man drinking PBR with two ponies on Bourbon Street.

It has also become part of my own history, which I wasn't expecting when I first looked it up on TripAdvisor.

I went looking for one of America's oldest bars. It turns out I didn't need it to be.