Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, National Historic Landmark bar in French Quarter, New Orleans, United States.
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop is an eighteenth-century building on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, constructed with briquette-entre-poteaux technique using bricks and wooden beams. The dimly lit rooms retain the original layout with low ceilings and a large fireplace at the back wall.
The building arose in the seventeen-seventies and first served as a residence before becoming a blacksmith shop. In the nineteen-forties a bar opened here after the structure had stood empty for decades.
The name comes from the Lafitte brothers, who ran a blacksmith shop here in the early nineteenth century while smuggling goods on the side. Today visitors come to the bar to drink in one of the oldest surviving buildings in the city, with candlelight filling the dark rooms.
The entrance sits at the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Philip Street, where you step through a low doorway into the dark rooms. It's best to visit the building in the early evening when fewer people are around and you can take in the architecture at a slower pace.
Some visitors report unusual sightings near the old fireplace, including a figure in sailor's clothing that people connect to the former owner. This detail adds to the building's reputation as a place with unexplained phenomena, drawing the curious.
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