Jackson Brewery

Lawrence Fabacher Sr. founded the Jackson Brewing Company in 1890 at 600 Decatur Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, named in honor of Andrew Jackson and the nearby Jackson Square; architect Dietrich Einsiedel designed the original 1891 Romanesque Revival building. The brewery, popularly known as Jax Brewery for its flagship Jax Beer, grew into the largest independent brewery in the South and the tenth-largest single-plant brewer in the country, eventually expanding into a large complex along the Mississippi River waterfront.

Jackson Brewing was one of only two New Orleans breweries, alongside Dixie, to survive Prohibition, having shifted temporarily to soft-drink production; a 1956 legal settlement with the unrelated Jacksonville Brewing Company secured Jackson’s exclusive rights to the “Jax” name. The brewery closed in 1974, after roughly 84 years of continuous operation, as the city’s oldest surviving brewer.

The historic building has since been redeveloped into The Shops at Jax Brewery, a shopping, dining and event destination; New Orleans public radio station WWOZ moved its studios into the building in 2023.

That brewery-to-retail-and-broadcast-studio transformation, a 19th-century industrial landmark surviving Prohibition as a soft-drink plant before eventually becoming a shopping center and, most recently, a public radio home, reflects how thoroughly this specific French Quarter riverfront site has repeatedly found new commercial and cultural uses across nearly a century and a half of continuous operation under one roof.