Unlike many southern cities, New Orleans did not confine its slave trade to a single market structure or even a handful of locations. Instead, slaves were sold citywide. Auction blocks in the sumptuous rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, private residences, public parks, decks of ships moored along the Mississippi, high-walled slave pens, and commercial complexes such as Banks Arcade all served as sites for the buying and selling of human beings. As the city expanded from its original footprint (today's French Quarter) into the Faubourgs Sainte Marie (now the Warehouse and Central Business Districts) and Marigny, the city's traders, hoteliers, bankers, auctioneers, brokers, and merchants followed suit. Where there was commerce, there were slave traders. 

Though it is impossible to capture the location of every slave sale that took place in antebellum New Orleans, the map linked below represents an effort to understand major landmarks in the city's expansive network of slave trading sites. Using city directories, newspaper advertisements, property records, historic maps, and an 1854 merchant census from the Office of the City Treasurer, researchers identified fifty-two discrete sites where the sale of men, women, and children took place on a large scale between 1811 and 1862. Though slave pens and auction houses were scattered throughout the city's core, three nodes of pronounced trading activity emerged: Esplanade Avenue at Moreau (now Chartres) Street, St. Louis Street between Royal Street and the levee, and the area bounded by Common, Carondelet, Union, and Phillippa (now O'Keefe) Streets, which, not coincidentally, also served as New Orleans's banking district.