St. Louis Hotel

The St. Louis Hotel was built in 1838 at the corner of St. Louis and Chartres Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Originally it was referred to as the City Exchange Hotel.

A hotel exists in the same place today but with a different name, the Omni Royal Orleans.

Creoles of New Orleans built the hotel to rival an Anglo-American-made hotel at the time near Canal Street on the upriver side, called the St. Charles Hotel. In February 1838, a contract for the French Quarter hotel's construction was signed; it was given the name “The City Exchange.” The hotel was the center of social activities for Creoles and visiting Europeans. It was meant to be a creole place; a place for aristocrats to eat, drink, make love, and buy and sell slaves.

Walking into the hotel, one could see the large auction block where slaves were sold. The auction block was under the grand rotunda of the building. Some slaves were brought in by sea from Baltimore, only for a number of them to be sold immediately upon disembarking. As for the others, they were put into slave pens in the French Quarter.

The St. Louis Hotel was where Maspero's Exchange was located, which was just one out of about fifty businesses in New Orleans which sold slaves. An example of the revenue produced by selling slaves at this location is from one auctioneer, Joseph Le Carpentier, whose slave sales totaled $57,075 in 1840, the equivalent of which is $1,585,416.67 in 2015.

The original hotel was host to a wide range of important people within the South. During the pre-Civil War period, the hotel was host to a large number of balls and meetings, the most well known being the bal travesti, where Henry Clay gave his first and only speech in New Orleans.

On occasion, the state legislature held sessions in the hotel's grand rotunda.

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