The 1st Ward or First Ward is one of the 17

Wards of New Orleans The city of New Orleans, in the U.S. state of Louisiana, is divided into 17 wards. Politically, the wards are used in voting in elections, subdivided into precincts. Under various previous city charters of the 19th century, aldermen and later cit ...

, divisions of the city of

New Orleans, Louisiana New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster. ; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...

. It is geographically one of the smaller wards of the city. Roughly triangular in shape, the boundaries are Thalia Street (below which is the city's 2nd Ward), Felicity Street (above which is the 10th Ward), and the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...

. The majority of this is in the historic

Lower Garden District Lower Garden District is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Central City/Garden District Area, its boundaries as defined by the New Orleans City Planning Commission are: St. Charles Avenue, Felicity, Prytania, Thalia, ...

History

This was an area of

Uptown New Orleans Uptown is a section of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, on the east bank of the Mississippi River, encompassing a number of neighborhoods (including the similarly-named and smaller Uptown area) between the French Quarter and the Jefferso ...

urbanized in the early decades of the 19th century. Despite the "First" designation, this was neither the oldest section of the city nor its seat of government. The current "1st Ward" was a result of a redrawing of divisions within the city in 1852, prior to which the city had been governed for a generation as 3 separate municipalities, each with its own wards. The First Ward of the newly unified city was designated as identical to the boundaries of the First Ward of the old 2nd Municipality as designated in 1847.

References

1 {{NewOrleans-stub