French Quarter Hotel on the Site of an 1794 Boys' School
919 Royal St, New Orleans, LA 70116
Research updated June 2026
Age
21+
Cost
$$$
Mid- to upper-mid French Quarter hotel rates. Adults-only property.
Access
Limited Access
Historic French Quarter building with stairs and courtyard; partial accessibility on the ground floor
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1890 · 1794 Great New Orleans Fire site · Former U.S. Federal Courthouse · Andrew Jackson contempt-of-court episode
The land at 919 Royal Street in New Orleans's French Quarter has a layered institutional history. In 1792 the Spanish Colonial government opened a boys' boarding school and orphanage on the site for boys who had lost their parents to yellow fever. The school was destroyed in the Great New Orleans Fire of 1794 — one of two catastrophic eighteenth-century fires that reshaped the French Quarter — and five boys died in the fire after becoming trapped by falling structural elements.
Following the fire a U.S. Federal Courthouse was built on the site and operated through the nineteenth century. During the courthouse era General Andrew Jackson was held in contempt of court and charged with obstruction of justice in the building, an episode that supplies the modern hotel's name. The courthouse was demolished in the late nineteenth century and the current building was erected in 1890.
The building has been operated as the Andrew Jackson Hotel for decades and is part of the French Quarter's continuous-stock of late-Victorian commercial-residential architecture. Today it operates as an adults-only boutique hotel and is a regular stop on New Orleans ghost-tour routes.
Sources
The Andrew Jackson Hotel's haunted reputation in French Quarter ghost-tour writing centers on the children of the 1794 fire. Guest accounts collected by US Ghost Adventures, Ghost City Tours, and French Quarter Phantoms describe children's laughter and playful sounds in the courtyard at night, light pranks during sleep, and a young figure sometimes called Armand who is described waking guests with laughter or pushing them out of bed.
A secondary figure described in tour-route retellings is a general apparition resembling Andrew Jackson, attached to the building's name and its courthouse-era contempt-of-court episode rather than to any documented death on the property.
These accounts circulate in the New Orleans ghost-tour industry rather than in named-investigator publications. The hotel's marketing openly references its haunted reputation and the children's-school history as part of the property's identity.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Book a room at the adults-only French Quarter hotel at 919 Royal Street. The site is associated with the 1794 fire that destroyed the Spanish Colonial-era boys' school and orphanage that previously stood here.
The Andrew Jackson Hotel is a regular stop on French Quarter ghost-tour routes. Walking tours pass by the Royal Street courtyard nightly.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
New Orleans, LA
The site at 717 Orleans Street in New Orleans' French Quarter has been continuously occupied since entrepreneur John Davis built the Orleans Theatre and Ballroom in 1817, designed by architect Henry Latrobe. The Sisters of the Holy Family — one of the earliest African American religious congregations in the United States — operated a school and orphanage in the building from 1881 to 1964 before the property was converted to its current hotel use.
New Orleans, LA
The Dauphine Orleans Hotel opened in 1969 as a French Quarter boutique hotel built around several existing historic buildings on Dauphine Street, the most notable of which is the former site of May Baily's Place - the first officially licensed bordello in New Orleans, which opened in 1857 under the city's 'Ordinance Concerning Lewd and Abandoned Women.' The original 1857 city license is displayed inside the hotel. The Audubon Cottage on the property is reputed to be a former workspace of naturalist John James Audubon.
New Orleans, LA
Hotel Provincial opened in 1961 in a complex of historic French Quarter buildings on Chartres Street. The complex includes Building 5, which served as a Confederate military hospital during the Civil War, treating wounded soldiers brought back from regional battles. Original buildings on the property were lost to fires in 1874 and 1878 and were rebuilt; current structures incorporate surviving 19th-century walls. The hotel remains family-owned and operates as a boutique property in the French Quarter.