Micaela Almonester de Pontalba's twin red-brick buildings frame two sides of Jackson Square, the oldest apartment buildings in the United States, their iron-lace balconies defining the French Quarter's visual identity. Micaela Almonester de Pontalba built these twin buildings in 1849 and 1850, and the story of how they came to exist is as dramatic as anything the city has produced. Micaela was the daughter of Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas, the Spanish philanthropist who funded the reconstruction of the cathedral and the Cabildo after the 1788 fire.
She inherited his fortune, married into a French aristocratic family, survived an assassination attempt by her father-in-law who shot her four times before killing himself, and moved to New Orleans determined to transform Jackson Square. She hired architect James Gallier Sr. and spent half a million dollars creating these buildings, which she designed partly herself, insisting on the cast-iron balcony railings — notice the interlocked A and P monograms woven into the ironwork, her initials and her husband's. The buildings mixed commercial space on the ground floor with fashionable residential apartments above, a model for urban living that the city would replicate across the Quarter for generations.