The Palm Court Building at 1202-08 Decatur Street Is For Sale, and It Comes With Nearly 200 Years of Story

1202-08 Decatur Street today. Photo courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty.

For thirty-five years, the downriver end of Decatur Street had a dress code nobody ever wrote down. Linen on the tables, a Steinway in the corner, a long mahogany bar, and a band in jackets playing jazz the way it sounded before anyone thought to call it traditional. That was the Palm Court Jazz Café, and on June 2, 2024, it played its last set.

Now the building itself is for sale. 1202-08 Decatur Street is listed at $3,300,000 by my Crescent Sotheby's colleagues David Smith and Stephanie Henne. And yes, I would love to walk you through it. Details on that at the bottom. First, the story, because this one earns the scroll.

A riverfront lot, sold by the city in 1834

Decatur Street started life as Rue de la Levée, the road along the river's edge. In January 1834, the City of New Orleans sold off the two lots that make up this property, and within two years the records credit a merchant named Alexander Grailhe with putting up a pair of three-story brick stores. Today 1202-04 reads as a Greek Revival commercial building from around 1840, with a dentiled cornice and cast iron columns at street level. Its neighbor at 1208 is two stories with dormers. The Vieux Carré Commission rates both fronts green, its mark for local architectural and historical importance.

My favorite detail: preservationists spotted a brick course between the second and third floors at 1204 that hints the building may once have been a story shorter. Buildings in the Quarter keep their own diaries if you know where to look.

The block on the 1876 Sanborn insurance map. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey. View the record: https://vcs.hnoc.org/property_info.php?lot=22630

Two free men of color, one wall apart

This is the chapter that stopped me cold in the archive. In 1857, Julien Adolphe Lacroix sold 1208 Decatur to his brother, François Lacroix. Both were free men of color. François was a tailor, a cloth merchant, and one of the most significant property owners in antebellum New Orleans. By 1861 his real estate holdings were valued at more than $200,000, which 64 Parishes puts at over $6 million in today's money. The building stayed in his hands until his death in 1876.

Next door at 1202-04, another free man of color, Henry Horn, bought the property in 1868 and held it until 1910. For a stretch of the 1800s, both halves of this building belonged to Creoles of color. That deserves to be said out loud.

1208 Decatur Street, June 24, 1964. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey. View the record: https://vcs.hnoc.org/property_info.php?lot=22631

The back door opened onto Gallatin Street

Both lots run straight through the block, from Decatur to what is now French Market Place. Until 1935, that back street was Gallatin Street, two short blocks of barrooms, dance houses and street gangs that historians describe as the city's most notorious vice district before Storyville. If Decatur was this building's Sunday suit, Gallatin was the back alley in a Scorsese film. The city cleared Gallatin's old tenements in the 1930s to expand the French Market, and the reputation went with them. Mostly.

Ten tractor-trailers of records

In 1987, George Buck and his wife Nina moved his jazz record labels, including Jazzology, GHB and American Music, from Atlanta to the French Quarter and into this building. It reportedly took ten tractor-trailers to haul the inventory. George set up his foundation, a recording studio and the archive upstairs. Nina looked at the ground floor of an old French Market warehouse and pictured a little English-style café.

That café became the Palm Court Jazz Café. It opened in 1989 and spent 35 years as one of the most gracious rooms in town for traditional jazz. Photographer Michael P. Smith caught trumpeter Doc Cheatham, born in 1905, playing there in 1995 with a young Nicholas Payton seated beside him. When George passed in 2013, his jazz funeral procession ended at the Palm Court's door, and when the club closed, the Louisiana Senate formally commended it.

Doc Cheatham and Nicholas Payton at Palm Court, 1995. Photograph by Michael P. Smith © The Historic New Orleans Collection. View it in the HNOC catalog: https://catalog.hnoc.org/search#/entity/hnoc/2007.0103.4.890/doc-cheatham-and-nicholas-payton-at-palm-court

What's here today

Photo courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty.

• About 17,207 square feet across three floors (appraiser figure)
• First floor: restaurant, kitchen, private dining room, plus a second dining room and bar on the 1208 side, with access through to 61 French Market Place
• Second floor: offices, storage and a recording studio
• Third floor: storage and two apartments
• Brick construction under a slate roof, built around 1840
• Offered at $3,300,000, MLS #2582391

Photo courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty.

The bones are here for hospitality, dining, music, or something nobody has dreamed up yet. Every city deserves its own Rick's Café Américain, a room where the piano never quite stops and everybody eventually walks through the door. Decatur Street has already proven it can be that room. It just needs its next Rick.

Photo courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty.

Book a private tour with me

I would be glad to show you through it myself, archive stories included. Call or text me at (504) 617-5184, email Richard@RichardHebertRealtor.com, or tap the button below to request a time and I'll coordinate it with the listing team.

Request a Private Tour

Richard W. Hébert
Global Luxury Real Estate Advisor
Crescent Sotheby's International Realty
(504) 617-5184
Richard@RichardHebertRealtor.com
RichardHebertRealtor.com
Licensed in Louisiana

Listed by David Smith and Stephanie Henne of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty, 617 Julia Street, New Orleans. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Buyers should independently verify all details.

Sources and photo credits

• The Historic New Orleans Collection, Vieux Carré Digital Survey, 1204 Decatur
• The Historic New Orleans Collection, Vieux Carré Digital Survey, 1208 Decatur
• The Historic New Orleans Collection catalog, Michael P. Smith photograph
• 64 Parishes, Free People of Color
• New Orleans Magazine, George Buck's Legacy
• OffBeat, Palm Court Jazz Café closure
• New Orleans Jazz Museum / A Closer Walk, Gallatin Street
• Louisiana Senate Resolution 161 (2024)