Antonio Monteleone arrived in New Orleans from Sicily around 1880, part of the massive wave of Italian immigration that would transform the French Quarter into "Little Palermo." Six years later, he bought his first hotel. When the neighboring Commercial Hotel came up for sale, he seized the opportunity to expand. Thirty rooms were added in 1903. Then in 1908, three hundred more rooms went up and the name officially became Hotel Monteleone. Antonio died in 1913, but the business passed to his son Frank, who in 1928 added two hundred more rooms -- just one year before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. The Hotel Monteleone was one of the few family-owned hotels in the nation to survive the economic catastrophe, a fact that speaks as much to the family's tenacity as to New Orleans' stubborn refusal to stop celebrating.

Ernest Hemingway made a point of staying at the Monteleone when visiting New Orleans. So did Tennessee Williams, who set scenes in The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending at the hotel. William Faulkner, the other towering figure of Southern literature, was also a regular guest. The literary connections run deep: Eudora Welty referenced the hotel in A Curtain of Green, John Grisham featured it in The Reckoning, and Rebecca Wells wove it into Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Stephen Ambrose, Anne Rice, and Richard Ford all have Monteleone connections. In June 1999, the Friends of the Library Association designated the Hotel Monteleone an official literary landmark -- only the third hotel in America to receive this distinction, alongside the Plaza and Algonquin Hotels in New York City. The Monteleone earned its place not through a single famous guest but through generations of writers who found something in its lobby and bar that made the words come easier.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Carousel Bar doubled as the entrance to the Swan Room, a nightclub where Liberace and Louis Prima performed to packed houses. The hotel itself was undergoing its most dramatic transformation during this period. In 1954, the original 1886 building was demolished entirely, and a new structure rose in its place with guest facilities, ballrooms, dining rooms, and cocktail lounges. Frank Monteleone died in 1958 and was succeeded by his son Bill, who oversaw the fifth and final major expansion in 1964: additional floors, more guest rooms, and a Sky Terrace with swimming pools. The Carousel Bar survived every renovation, continuing its slow rotation through decades of change. Its mechanism remains elegantly simple -- a chain powered by a small motor pulls the 25-seat platform around its track, and guests who sit long enough find their drinks have traveled a full circle.

Hollywood discovered the Hotel Monteleone long after the literary world had claimed it. The 1999 film Double Jeopardy, starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, transformed the Carousel Bar into an Armani shop for filming. Glory Road used the lobby as a stand-in for a fancy hotel in another city. Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton filmed The Last Time in the lobby, the Carousel Bar, and the Hunt Room Grill. John Cena's 12 Rounds shot scenes across the hotel, from the Vieux Carre Suite on the fourteenth floor to the boiler room and rooftop. Girls Trip in 2017 brought another production crew through the doors. The hotel's appeal to filmmakers mirrors its appeal to writers: it possesses the kind of atmosphere that cannot be fabricated on a soundstage, the accumulated character of a building that has been continuously operated by the same family for nearly a century and a half.