I spoke to the manager and told him about the Sanborn maps and questioned how they could claim to be the oldest bar in the country since 1772 when they also claim to have been a blacksmith shop in the Lafitte era and that I have records that show it was a cobbler shop in 1897. So in 2006 when Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop's bar-back, Darryl, began wearing a t-shirt with the claim to the oldest bar in the United States, I questioned it and he got a little defensive and simply said that the claim was true. (Attached is a photo taken circa 1895 which shows the outbuilding at the side - notice both the outbuilding and the main building each feature vitrines - it's a shame that the sign on the main building is unreadable.)
In rooting around in other records I found that the property had a dependancy to the side where the courtyard is which was demolished around 1910 and that the oyster shop was in the outbuilding while the building which still stands on the corner served as the cobbler shop. Mongo and served as a combination oyster shop and cobbler. According to that directory, the building that is now Lafitte’s Blacksmith was owned by a C. I processed the Sanborn survey of 1897 for the City Archives in fact, they said I could keep the photocopies of the Sanborn file they sent me and they are still in my library and I still refer to them frequently.
( Click here for more information on Sanborn Maps.) Their documentation is very thorough and extremely complete - detailing the buildings, their addresses (and in New Orleans they include the buildings' old and new addresses, which is valuable when one is researching a building prior to the address renumbering in 1895), their construction, who owned them and (most importantly) how they were used. There was a cartography firm called Sanborn that made maps and surveys in cities around the country for use in fire insurance.