shrine · 3.2 mi · St. Roch
St. Roch Chapel
A yellow-fever chapel whose walls are still hung with glass eyes and wooden legs.
After the 1868 epidemic, survivors left what the disease had spared: crutches, plaster hearts, glass prosthetic eyes. The small cemetery chapel in the 8th Ward still holds them — dusty, unlabeled, and quietly attended. It is less a museum than a room that never finished thanking whoever listened.
St. Roch Cemetery No. 1, 1725 St. Roch Avenue. The chapel is often unlocked by day; go quiet, and do not touch the offerings.
museum · 0.4 mi
New Orleans Pharmacy Museum
French Quarter
An 1823 apothecary that once sold cocaine tonics and still keeps a jar of leeches.
Louis J. Dufilho Jr., the first licensed pharmacist in the United States, mixed medicines here on Chartres Street. The cabinets still hold gris-gris, patent oils, and a soda fountain that dispensed cocaine-laced nerve tonics. It is the city’s most elegant reminder that pharmacy used to be half science, half spell.
514 Chartres Street. Small admission; the courtyard of medicinal plants is worth the extra minute.
remnant · 1.1 mi
Tomb of the Unknown Slave
Treme
A cross welded from ship chains, marking graves that were never named.
In the garden of St. Augustine Church — the first Black Catholic parish in the South — a rusted steel cross of anchor chain stands over unmarked earth. It remembers Africans buried without record beside the church they were made to build. Almost no walking tours stop here, which is part of why it still feels like a tomb.
1210 Governor Nicholls Street, in the side garden of St. Augustine. Free, open when the grounds are.
ritual · 0.8 mi
Saint Expedite
Rampart
A saint who arrived in a crate marked Expedite — so that became his name.
At Our Lady of Guadalupe, a painted Roman soldier stands in a niche no one ordered. Legend says a crate arrived unlabeled except for the shipping instruction. Locals leave pound cake and rum when they need a favor in a hurry. The church never asked for him, and he has been answering anyway since the 19th century.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, 411 N. Rampart Street. Look left of the altar; cake is customary, not required.
