Congo Square, within Louis Armstrong Park on the edge of Tremé, is one of the most historically significant sites in American music. During the French and Spanish colonial periods, enslaved Africans gathered here on Sundays to maintain the musical and cultural traditions of West Africa — drumming, singing, dancing in styles that had no parallel elsewhere in North America, where similar gatherings were suppressed. The result, over generations, was a fusion of African rhythmic traditions with European harmonics and American experience that became jazz.
The square today is a modest oval of grass with a monument acknowledging its history. Armstrong Park surrounds it with live oak trees and a lagoon; Louis Armstrong's statue stands at the park entrance on Rampart Street. The park is a peaceful place to sit, and the knowledge of what happened on this ground gives it a weight that is not immediately apparent from the setting. The Tremé neighbourhood around it — the oldest African American neighbourhood in the United States — extends the historical context on every street.