The Cobbler Who Built a Tower

You're standing on Royal Street in the French Quarter, in front of the Hotel Monteleone. Tip your head back and take in the height of it. In a neighborhood of two- and three-story buildings with iron balconies, this hotel includes the only high-rise building in the interior of the Quarter. And the man who started it all fixed shoes for a living.

Antonio Monteleone was a cobbler from Sicily. He arrived in New Orleans around 1880 and set up shop right here on Royal Street, which back then was a center of commerce and banking. In 1886 the shoemaker bought a small hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville. When the nearby Commercial Hotel came up for sale, he bought that too.

Then the building grew, and grew. Thirty rooms were added in 1903. Three hundred more came in 1908, and the name changed from the Commercial Hotel to Hotel Monteleone. Antonio died in 1913, and his son Frank took over. In 1928 Frank added another 200 rooms. His timing was awful: the stock market crashed the next year. But the family held on, and the hotel was one of the few family-owned hotels in the nation to survive the Depression.

Now the catch: that 1886 date is the family's beginning, not the building's. In 1954 the original building was demolished and a new one laid out in its place. More floors and a rooftop terrace came in 1964. So the tower you're looking at is younger than many of the people who swear it's haunted.

And they do swear. Guests and staff tell recurring stories of elevators acting on their own, of children seen where no children should be, and of apparitions in the halls. Those are stories, and they're part of the hotel's reputation. What is documented is the family: five generations of Monteleones, from Antonio to Frank to Frank's son Bill to Bill's son William Jr., who took over in 2011.

The literary crowd came too. Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner made a point of staying here, and the hotel turns up in books by Eudora Welty, Williams and John Grisham. Truman Capote once claimed on The Tonight Show that he was born in the Hotel Monteleone. He wasn't. His mother lived here while she was pregnant, but she made it to the hospital in time.

If you step inside, find the Carousel Bar, installed in 1949. Its 25 seats ride on 2,000 large steel rollers, pulled by a chain powered by a motor of just a quarter horsepower. It makes one full turn every 15 minutes. Slow enough that you barely notice, and quick enough that, after a drink or two, you might swear the room has moved.

When you're ready, walk northeast on Royal Street, about 460 meters and seven minutes, to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, where the shelves still hold the kind of remedies that make a ghost story feel unnecessary.