New Orleans Jazz Museum

The New Orleans Jazz Museum is housed in the Old US Mint — the only building in America to have served as both a US and a Confederate mint — and it tells the story of jazz from its origins in Congo Square and Storyville to its global spread, through instruments, recordings, photographs, and the kind of personal artifacts that make a music genre feel like a community.

The collection includes Louis Armstrong's first cornet, the piano from Lulu White's Mahogany Hall (a Storyville bordello where Jelly Roll Morton played), and recording equipment used to capture the earliest jazz performances. The instruments are displayed not as relics but as working objects — the museum regularly hosts live performances in its third-floor concert space, where musicians play the same music in a building that stored the same city's gold.

The Old Mint building itself, constructed in 1835, is a Greek Revival structure that processed $300 million in gold and silver coins during its operating years. During the Civil War, the Confederate government briefly used it to mint its own currency before Union forces recaptured New Orleans in 1862. The combination of monetary history and musical history under one roof is uniquely New Orleans — a city where culture and commerce have always been inseparable, and where the most important American art form was invented by people who had almost nothing but their talent and their instruments.