Browse Items (123 total)

Philip Esteve applies for liquor license for 604 Iberville Street.

Street map indicating the location of the Upstairs Lounge on the corner of Chartres and Iberville.

Floor Plan of bar drawn after the fire, showing the three rooms and escape route along with location of fatalities.

Bartender Buddy Rasmussen and the interior bar area of the Upstairs Lounge, Mardi Gras 1973.

Photo 1: Stanley Plaisance, Gene Davis, and two unknown bar patrons.
Photo 2: Mardi Gras costume contest, 1973.

This popular song (recorded by the Brotherhood of Man) is the anthem sung regularly by Upstairs Lounge patrons gathered around the piano.

Newspaper announcement of melodramatic production at the Upstairs Theater.

Photo 1: Audience gathers in theater before show. Persons identified: Bill Larson (back row seated, 2nd from right); Ricky "Mother" Cross (back row, 4th from right); Francis Dufrene (across from Bill Larson); Reggie Adams (to left of Dufrene);…

Photo 1: Tad Turner as the heroine Pauline and Adam Fontenot as the hero Harold Trueblood in production of “The Rise and Fall of Sir Jaspar Hardmaster.”
Photo 2: Rick Everett as Connie Francis in "Where the Boys Are."

Firemen peer from the charred windows of a second story bar in the New Orleans French Quarter that [was] gutted by a flash fire Sunday night leaving 29 dead and 15 injured. The bar is located at the corner of Iberville and Chartes just a block off…

Linn Quinton weeps as he is helped by New Orleans firemen after he escaped from a fire at the Upstairs bar on Sunday night. Quinton said he was with a group singing around the piano when the fire swept through the bar leaving 29 dead [and] 15…

Firemen give first aid to survivors of a French Quarter fire that swept through a second story bar leaving 29 dead and 15 injured. Several persons leaped to safety before the entire bar was engulfed in flames in New Orleans.

A rescue worker leans heavy against a charred window at the Upstairs bar in New Orleans where 29 persons died and another 15 were injured during a fire Sunday night. The rescue worker was helping remove the bodies when apparently he couldn’t face it…

A fire department snorkel was used to remove the body of man, one of 20 killed Sunday night when fire raced through the Upstairs, a French Quarter bar.

Charred remains of the main room of the bar, facing Chartres Street. Most of the victims were found at these barred windows.

Bodies burned as bar patrons tried to escape through the barred windows facing Chartres Street.

New Orleans’ daily morning newspaper, The Times-Picayune, publishes several articles the next day reporting the appalling suffering of the fire victims as well as the survivors.

The next-afternoon coverage in The State-Times, published in Baton Rouge, includes undercurrents of aversion to homosexuality.

This edition of the The State-Times (Advocate) from Baton Rouge mixes even more homophobic subtext into its reporting.

The Morning Advocate, on the second morning after, reports presence of national gay leaders Kight and Perry and focuses on MCC interim pastor killed in fire.