Barthelemy Lafon

Barthélemy Lafon (1769–1820) was a notable Creole architect, engineer, city planner, and surveyor in New Orleans, Louisiana. He appears to have had a double life, as a respectable architect, engineer, and citizen; but also as a privateer, smuggler, and pirate. In later life his association with piracy, specifically with Jean and Pierre Lafitte became public knowledge.

Lafon was born in Villepinte, France, and traveled to New Orleans c. 1790. He designed several public buildings, including public baths (plans submitted in 1797, but the bath house was never built) and a lighthouse, and numerous private homes (including the Benachi cotton brokers' house and the Vincent Rillieux house).

After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, with the Mississippi River open to free trade, land owners just upriver from the Vieux Carré realized that the old quarter dominated by the Spanish and French could not contain the hordes of Americans who were now flocking to the city, and they retained Lafon to subdivide their property and create an American suburb. From 1806 to 1809, Lafon also served as deputy surveyor of Orleans Parish, during the territorial period prior to statehood.

He prepared elaborate plans for what is today known as the Lower Garden District. His designs crossed the boundaries of five plantations (Soule, LaCourse, Annunciation, Nuns, and Panis), to include all properties up to Felicity Street. A lover of the classics, Lafon named his streets after the nine muses of Greek mythology: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Euterpe, Polymnia, and Urania. His sophisticated plan featuring tree-lined canals, fountains, churches, markets, a grand classical school, and a coliseum; but few of these features were ever realized. However, the grid pattern of streets survives, as do the parks and some of the street names leading to Coliseum Square. In 2014-15, one of the neighborhood association's projects is to restore the Lafon Fountain in Coliseum Square, installed c.1976, with plans to restore two other nearby fountains.

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