75 Years In Motion: The Story Behind New Orleans' Spinning Carousel Bar

Forbes

6 days ago

Carousel Bar
Walk into the Hotel Monteleone and you'll feel it before you really see it. There's a soft hum in the room, a sort of hypnotic motion, and then you realize—the bar itself is moving. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a carousel of 25 seats turns in a gentle circle, carrying cocktails and conversation with it.
This September, the Carousel Bar will celebrate its 75th birthday. And like so many New Orleans institutions, its story is tangled up with the history of the city, the music, the literature, and—of course—the drinks.
Sazerac
'The hotel's legacy actually begins about in the early 1800s when Antonio Monteleone immigrated here from Sicily. He was a shoemaker, and he set up a shoe shop across the street where the Angela King gallery is today, and across the street was a small, 35 room hotel called the Victor, and in 1886 he had the opportunity to purchase it, and that's when he became started the hotel Monteleone,' Marvin Allen, Beverage Director at the Hotel Monteleone told me from a seat at the iconic bar.
Hotel Monteleone
Antonio was forward-thinking. By 1909, he had added 300 rooms, renamed the property Hotel Monteleone, and fireproofed the place—no small thing in a city that had seen its fair share of French Quarter blazes. Over the years the hotel became one of the first to offer ceiling fans, radios, and eventually air conditioning in every room. It stayed open through everything the city threw at it, from hurricanes to an ill-advised government plan in the 1960s to run an interstate straight through the French Quarter.
'In all their wisdom, what the government was going to do is put an interstate along the riverfront, which would have wiped out the complete French Quarter. And these two ladies decided no, that was not going to happen. So they fought it. We got it as declared as a historic district,' Allen says.
The Monteleone also became a literary landmark—home turf for Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Anne Rice, Stephen King and more. 'Tennessee Williams was a big friend of the hotel. He would sit here at the carousel and he would write and watch people on Royal Street, and they'll become characters in some of his plays,' says Allen.
Carousel Bar
On September 3, 1949, the bar itself began to move. 'That's the day the carousel opened. It did not look like this. We didn't have a canopy over the top. It was just like white acoustical tiles. This was a wooden bar top. These stools were just like round diner stools. It was very plain,' Allen says.
Carousel Bar
In the 1960s the bar gained its red-and-white striped canopy, and in 1992, Disney artists hand-painted the whimsical horses and panels that circle the bar today. A big remodel in 2011 brightened the space and added windows facing Royal Street, but the carousel itself still runs the same way: 'It's 25 seats to go around here. There's about 2000 big ball bearings that operate it, about four or six wheels, big bicycle chain and a quarter horsepower electric motor operates this and keeps it going around,' Allen explains.
Once it starts spinning in the morning, it doesn't stop until midnight. And yes, bartenders really do have to vault over the bar to get in and out. 'You hop over, that's the only way in and out,' Allen says with a grin. One new hire lasted just 30 minutes after realizing they weren't kidding about the jumping.
Carousel Bar
The Carousel Bar has seen some things in its 75 years: speakeasy culture during Prohibition ('they took our booze from us. How dare them. Or they tried to, they tried to, they did not succeed, especially here in New Orleans,' says Allen), movie crews filming Girls Trip and CSI: New Orleans, ghosts (a mischievous maintenance man named Red and a little boy on the 14th floor), and even an impromptu piano set from Billy Joel during Jazz Fest.
Carousel Bar
And of course, there are the drinks. If you sit down for a spin, order the official cocktail of New Orleans—the Sazerac—or the house specialty, the Vieux Carré, a rich, boozy blend of Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac, Sazerac rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, and two kinds of bitters.
Seventy-five years after the first carousel riders bellied up to the bar, it's still turning—just a little slower than you might expect. Maybe that's the point. You sit down, the world goes by, and for a drink or two, you're part of the story.