NEW ORLEANS'Try to find just one corner in New Orleans that could lay claim as the birthplace of jazz and, surprisingly, it wouldn't even be close to Bourbon St.

"If you had to pick just one corner, this would be it," says Billy Fields, a professor at The University of New Orleans, standing at the intersection of Perdido and South Rampart in an area known as the Central Business District.

The windows of the red brick Eagle Saloon are boarded up, the tall doors secured with an array of locks, but for jazz enthusiasts this is sacred ground.

It's the very corner where a young Louis Armstrong fired off a pistol one New Year's Eve, was promptly collared by the police and shipped off to the Colored Waifs Home for Boys. To keep the 12-year-old Armstrong occupied, he was given a cornet, some instruction and encouragement to play. The rest is truly jazz history.

"This is a lost jazz landscape," continues Fields, who has written extensively on the Crescent City neighbourhoods of Armstrong. "A hundred years ago, this was a richly developed neighbourhood of homes and businesses. It bordered on a marshy swamp and marked the last edge of the city's high ground. It was a poor neighbourhood, but was also a hive of activity."

More than 20 years ago, the U.S. Congress designated jazz "a rare and valuable national American treasure," establishing the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park ' a collection of citywide sites marking the origins and early history of jazz. The commission developed six jazz history walking tours, each organized by district, with maps and brochures describing the highlights along the routes.

In some spots, clubs still open their doors to musicians nightly; in many others, the bar, recording studio, beer parlour or hotel is long gone, a victim of what Fields calls "destruction through highways."

"In the early 1950s, they knocked down these historical jazz neighbourhoods by chopping up areas to bring the automobile into the city," says Fields. "They widened the road and knocked out Armstrong's first house. Then we knocked out his second house by putting in City Hall. The historical aerial photos show these beautiful neighbourhoods. They were where jazz developed and they have enormous cultural and historical value."

Steps from the Eagle Saloon is the Iroquois Theater, once home to vaudeville shows and a regular hangout for the young Armstrong.

"He was around in this neighbourhood all the time," says Fields. "He used to walk along these streets."

Next door is the building that once housed the Karnofsky Store, a second home of sorts for Armstrong, who worked on their coal and junk wagons, playing a bugle to announce their arrival.

"Armstrong mentioned all of these places (in his autobiography), I went looking for them and I found them. This is an amazing history and much of it is just sitting here, dilapidated."

Most of the collection of artifacts at the New Orleans Jazz Museum in the Old U.S. Mint building are still in storage, post-Katrina. But the second-floor display of movie posters and two glass cases ' one with Armstrong's battered, first cornet, and the second with Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet ' can bring tears to the eye of hardcore jazz devotees.

Jo Matyas is a freelance writer and Craig Jones is a writer and musician from Kingston , Ont.

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