Chapter 10% in

Ignatius J. Reilly

The D.H. Holmes clock, Canal Street

Chapter 1

The book begins with the hero loitering under a landmark department-store clock, waiting for his mother and sneering at the crowd of shoppers around him. The store is long gone, redeveloped into a hotel, but a bronze figure in a hunting cap now stands under a replica clock to mark where the comedy starts.

Chapter 1

explicitThe novel opens by name at the clock outside the D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street; the store closed in 1989 and the building is now a hotel, with a statue of the hero marking the spot at 819 Canal.

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Ignatius J. Reilly

The Reilly house, Constantinople Street

Chapter 1

The hero lives with his widowed mother in a cramped house on a quiet Uptown street, holed up in a back room writing screeds against the modern age. The author names the street but no address; the humble shotgun houses in the 600 block have long been read as the model for the home.

Chapter 1

inferredToole names Constantinople Street in Uptown but never gives a number; local research points to the modest shotgun houses in the 600 block of the Touro neighbourhood, so this marks that block.

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Chapter 250% in

Ignatius J. Reilly

The Night of Joy, Bourbon Street

Chapter 2

A seedy Bourbon Street nightclub is the engine of half the plot, with its put-upon barmaid, its scheming owner, and a stripper whose act involves a cockatoo. The bar itself is fiction, but the author sets it firmly on the real Bourbon Street, amid the drink and neon the hero loudly deplores.

Chapter 2

explicitThe Night of Joy bar is invented, but the novel plants it explicitly on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, so this marks a representative point on the strip of neon and clubs.

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Chapter 475% in

Ignatius J. Reilly

Levy Pants, down by the river

Chapter 4

The hero takes a clerical job at a shabby, failing trouser factory downriver, where he promptly launches a doomed workers' crusade and files the correspondence in the bin. The author sites the plant by the river near the Industrial Canal, in the working district now called Bywater.

Chapter 4

inferredLevy Pants is fictional; the novel places it downriver by the Industrial Canal near Poland Avenue, in what is now Bywater, so this marks that riverside stretch. No surviving building matches the described factory.

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Chapter 6100% in

Ignatius J. Reilly

The French Quarter hot-dog rounds

Chapter 6

Cast out to earn a living, the hero pushes a hot-dog cart through the French Quarter, eating most of the stock himself and costumed as a pirate to hawk them. The cart wanders the old streets around Jackson Square, the tourist heart of the Quarter, which anchors this stop.

Chapter 6

explicitThe novel sets the hero's vending in the French Quarter without fixing one corner, since the cart roams, so this marks the heart of the Quarter at Jackson Square.

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