Basin Street gave jazz one of its most famous anthems. Basin Street runs along the edge of the old Tremé neighborhood and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the principal commercial artery of the district that surrounded Storyville, the licensed vice district where jazz crystallized as a musical form. W.C. Handy wrote Basin Street Blues in 1926, encoding the street's name into the musical mythology of America: Way down in New Orleans, that's the land of dreams, you'll never know how nice it seems or how much it really means — glad to be back home, to meet someone who knows all about the place called Basin Street.
The street today bears little physical resemblance to its legendary incarnation; Storyville was demolished for housing projects in the 1930s, and Basin Street itself has been partly absorbed into modern urban infrastructure. But the geography of early jazz is still legible if you know what you're looking for: the cemeteries to the east, the Tremé to the south, Congo Square within walking distance, and the neighborhoods where Black musicians lived and played radiating outward from this central corridor. The New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, nearby on N. Peters Street, presents the history of this geography with recorded music and maps that make the spatial logic of jazz's origins clear.