Horn Street Business District ["Ape Yard"]
An area of Black-owned and operated businesses, this block was the hub of African American life in downtown Natchitoches. While the name likely began as a pejorative applied to the newly formed district by the White community during the early days of Jim Crow, African Americans who participated in this project observed that White people in their generations did not use the term. Instead, the African American community claimed ownership of the name, and a second business area was established and named called the South Ape Yard.
We probably shouldn’t have called it [the Ape Yard], but that’s what we all called it…. You can’t change history, and you can’t change that name that everybody used.
Businesses included barbershops, cafés, and shoe-shine stands. The Ape Yard existed during the era of strictly enforced segregation, providing African Americans with services not available to them in White-owned businesses.
You’d go to the Circle Café, but you had to go in the back…. But, if you didn’t have downtown access to food, you’d go to the bus station – you had the White side and you had the Colored side; but, the Ape Yard was a gathering place where Blacks would meet each other and they would just have fellowship in that area.
Most Afro-Americans went down on Saturday and congregated there because there was a café and a liquor store and other kinds of little old shops … a cab stand, and they sold cotton…. There were a lot of activities going on back there, so consequently it was one of the places our people could go and feel comfortable going there. Nobody would bother them back there at that time.
We used to go to the Ape Yard, because, when we were little, that’s where all the Blacks were. They had a Black barbershop down there and they had the man who’d take pictures down there and we would go down there in the Ape Yard. They had little activities for us.
Detail from Sheet 6, April 1923, Sanborn Map, Natchitoches, Louisiana. Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970
1950 Natchitoches Telephone Directory, CHRC