The St. Thomas was one of the oldest housing developments in New Orleans, built between 1938 and 1941 in the Irish Channel, in the Lower Garden District near the Mississippi River. It was one of the very first public housing projects in the entire country, part of the national effort begun in the 1930s to give working families safe, affordable homes.

For sixty years, St. Thomas was a close, proud community just uptown of the Central Business District. Its brick buildings and courtyards were home to thousands of families over the generations. Living near the river and the wharves, many residents worked the docks and the nearby jobs, and the neighborhood built its own tight-knit world block by block.

St. Thomas was a wellspring of New Orleans music and culture. Brass bands, second lines, and Mardi Gras traditions were part of everyday life, and the development produced musicians and culture bearers whose influence spread far beyond the neighborhood. On any given day you might hear a band practicing or see a second line rolling through the streets. That culture was not a show for outsiders. It was simply how people lived.

Everyday life in St. Thomas ran on family and community. Grandmothers raised whole blocks of children, neighbors shared what they had, and the elders kept watch over everybody. Churches anchored the neighborhood, and kids grew up surrounded by aunties, uncles, and cousins, whether by blood or by bond. People took real pride in being from St. Thomas.

Like the other big projects, St. Thomas went through hard years. During the 1980s and 1990s it was one of the city’s most troubled developments, hit hard by the drug era and by years of neglect. The news often told only the worst stories. But the people who grew up there will tell you that was never the whole truth. St. Thomas was cookouts, ballgames, church on Sunday, and a family bond that held through good times and bad.

Beginning in 1998, the city moved to tear St. Thomas down and rebuild it as a mixed-income neighborhood called River Garden. By 2001 the last residents had been evicted and the old buildings were gone. The redevelopment became one of the most debated in the city’s history, because of some 1,500 public-housing apartments that were lost, only a fraction were replaced, and many longtime residents were never able to move back.

The new development looks nothing like the old St. Thomas, and for the families who lived there, the loss still stings. But the name carries weight. It stands for one of the oldest Black communities in the city, a place that gave New Orleans generations of music, culture, and strong families.

The Irish Channel and Lower Garden District around St. Thomas carried layers of New Orleans history, from the immigrant waves of the 1800s to the Black working-class families who made the neighborhood their own in the twentieth century. St. Thomas sat at the center of that story, a stone’s throw from the river that built the city.

When people talk about the old St. Thomas today, they talk about the people first: the neighbor who cooked for the whole hallway, the coach who kept kids on the right path, the band that practiced in the courtyard. Those memories are the true history, and they are exactly what this page is here to preserve.

This page is here to keep that history alive. The families of St. Thomas are scattered across the city and beyond, but they stay connected through reunions, memories, and online groups. The buildings came down, but the pride and the bonds remain, and this is a place for the St. Thomas family to remember, reconnect, and pass the story on to the next generation.