the french quarter is made up of a series of sqaures.  i need to know
what the length of the square that is made up of these four streets. 
Bourben Street, Saint Peter Street, Royal Street and Toulouse Street
(from building to buildig or sidewalk to sidewalk).  Also the width of
the saint peter street.

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Request for Question Clarification by cynthia-ga on 11 Feb 2006 17:23 PST

I'm trying not to imagine you want the distance in say --inches or feet...

What are you trying to do? 
Can't you just count the blocks on a map?
What do you mean by "length of the square"?
What do you mean by "width of Saint Peter Street"?

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Clarification of Question by jdubkid-ga on 13 Feb 2006 18:13 PST

Inches and feet indeed.  I need to know the distance (ie length or
width in inches and feet) of one of the sqaures.  It was laid out in
1718 by Jean Bienville and I think he used a French measuring tool
called a Rod(16.5').  So basically I want to know how many rods he
used to make the sqaure.  I am getting to many conflicting dimensions.
 Thanks.

How about this:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/new_orleans_1763.jpg

Click to enlarge and you will see that the scale is in "toises"  (Rod
is an English measurement, though Bienville may have used it).


Definitions of toise on the Web:

    * Traditional French unit of length equal to 6 old French 'pieds'
or feet, or 6.4 English feet.
      users.rcn.com/deeds/survey.htm

    * A linear measure used by the French in the old regime. A toise
is equal to 76.71 English inches, 6.39 English feet or 1.9490 meters.
      www.forts.org/glossary.htm

I estimated that the length of a block plus one street (or street
center to st. center) is 80 toises or 512 ft and estimate the width of
a street as 7 toises or 44.8 ft.  But you can download the image and
play with it for more accuracy.

This earlier map is to a larger scale as an image and might help.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/new_orleans_1728.jpg

And then you can try Google Earth, which has a very high definition for NO.
I don't know if there is a way to get measurements, but if we can
assume that the checkerboard of blocks has not changed, a little
calculation would give street widths.

I hope this helps.  Please let me know.

Myoarin

jdubkid-ga,
Hmm, yesterday you posted a comment here, I believe, but perhaps you
removed it in order to avoid suggesting that my comments were
sufficient.  Quite right.  :-)

Trust Google Earth:  there is a "measure" tool.  Click on "tools". 
Unfortunately it seems to plop right on the image, but you can adjust
it to feet, and then click on the corner of a block and get the
distance to another point.
If we can trust that the blocks in the French Quarter are equal, maybe
another one is better to measure.  I agree that my 512 ft from the old
map seems too long by a significant amount.  After playing with the
Google tool, it seems that the builtup side of a block is 50 toises,
ca 320.5 ft and the street plus sidewalk 6 toises, ca. 38.3 ft.
I have wildly assumed that the old measurement was used in full
multiples and backed into my figures from several measurements from
G-Earth.

That is surely not good enough for you.

Orleans Parish is a little behind the times as far as establishing
electronic assessors; one site said that one of the seven assessors in
the parish is "thinking about it".

I would be interested in what you may find.

Regards,

It appears that the French Quarter street plan was actually designed
by and a French engineer named Pierre Le Blond de la Tour his
assistant engineer named Adrien de Pauger.