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The Maple Leaf is one of New Orleans most celebrated and sensual music venues with its red peeling paint on the tin walls, a shadowy, overgrown back patio, and a narrow dance hall with music that shoots into the audience and through the building’s cracks to the enjoyment of outside show-goers.  There is also a neighborhood saloon part of the Leaf’s existence that is often overlooked.  It was the need to have a Carrollton gathering place that inspired six investors united by their enthusiasm for drinking, chess, and debate to open the Maple Leaf in 1974. Originally the Maple Leaf Rag Time and Chess Club, the Leaf was initially more of a “talking” bar and featured an array of personalities from the city’s educated and powerful to the neighborhood’s homeless. You can still find various evolutions of this “talking” crowd at the front bar or out on the patio in the afternoons before the nightly music transforms the bar into an internationally acclaimed club.

The Leaf regulars, whether afternoon philosophers or late night dancers, have a strong sense of community, and they have created their own krewe, the Krewe of Oak, that costumes and parades every Mardi Gras and Mid-Summer Mardi Gras, taking the Maple Leaf on a musical Uptown bar hop. Throughout the rest of the year, the krewe is held together by the regular rhythm of events at the Maple Leaf like holiday potlucks, Sunday poetry readings and crawfish boils, birthday parties, weddings, and wakes. These events make a community that distinguishes the Maple Leaf as much as its pressed tin and live New Orleans music.

Nominated by Bethany Rogers, Cornerstones Director.

Address: 8316 Oak Street

Neighborhood: Carrollton

Historic District:Carrollton (National)

City Council District: A 

Status:The first music club to re-open in New Orleans after Katrina and the first after the storm to feature local live music every night.

Cornerstones has more in-depth documentation on file – info@cornerstonesproject.org.