Abandoned Dixie Brewery

The Dixie Brewing Company operated on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans for much of the twentieth century, making it one of the city's longest-running and best-known local beer producers before Hurricane Katrina forced the brewery to shut down in 2005.

The company had roots going back to the early twentieth century, and the Tulane Avenue complex grew into a substantial industrial campus of interconnected brick and frame buildings housing fermentation tanks, boiler rooms, loading floors, and multi-storey production halls with catwalks and gallery levels typical of large-scale brewery construction from that era.

When Katrina struck in August 2005, the brewery did not reopen. The buildings sat vacant in the years that followed, the courtyard filling with weeds while the interiors accumulated debris, discarded furniture, and deteriorating wooden floors and framing. The ornate wrought-iron entrance gates on Tulane Avenue remained standing through the abandonment, along with much of the original industrial equipment inside.

The site became widely known as a destination for urban explorers drawn to its scale and the relative intactness of its machinery and architecture. Redevelopment proposals circulated over the years, and the property eventually changed hands with plans to convert the complex into a new use, though the buildings spent well over a decade in a state of open decay after the storm.