Algiers (/ælˈdʒɪərz/) is a historic neighborhood of New Orleans and is the only Orleans Parish community located on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. Algiers is known as the 15th Ward, one of the 17 wards of New Orleans. It was once home to many jazz musicians.

Algiers was established in 1719 as a plantation, not a neighborhood. It was first used as the location for the city's powder magazine, a holding area for the newly arrived enslaved Africans. Decades later, it became a port call for the displaced Cajuns. This region of the city was a French colonial encampment originally managed by Le Page du Pratz on which cabins housed the enslaved. According to geographer Richard Campanella, Ph.D., this area was used as a

warehouse, workshop, lumber mill and a farm in service of the principal colony across the river. Its primary use, however, was as a depository for captive Africans recently arrived from Senegambia as well as the Bight of Benin and Congo regions. Before then it was known as the Company Plantation, the site in the 1720s had more than 30 cabins used for the temporary sheltering of slaves until they were sold to colonists, or for their permanent housing if they were owned by the Company itself—as were 154 people at one point, making present-day Algiers Point.

Developed as a town by Barthelemy Duverjé, Algiers expanded due mainly to the shipbuilding and repair industries of the dry docks and the extensive railroad yards. A large part of the town surrounding the Courthouse was destroyed by fire in 1895.

In 1870, Algiers was annexed to the city as the 15th Ward, an arrangement which has remained despite repeated discussions of secession. Until the latter 1930s, rail yards housed large amounts of freight and rolling stock, which was brought back and forth across the Mississippi River by barge. Then, the Huey P. Long Bridge, which included a railway bridge, was built upriver at Bridge City, Louisiana. The largest railroad presence had been the Southern Pacific yard. That location is still known to Algerines as "the SP yard." For decades, it was largely a vacant strip. Portions of the tract were redeveloped for housing in the early 21st century. In the yard's active days, a steam-powered Southern Pacific train ferry brought railroad cars from there across the Mississippi River.^{[citation needed]}

In 1901, the U.S. Navy established a naval station in Algiers. During the early 20th century, Algiers was segregated due to the Jim Crow Laws of the Southern United States. Under Jim Crow, blacks were not allowed to live in Algiers Point, which was tended for whites or Creoles of color who passed as white. Blacks occupied the area downriver from Algiers Point called McDonoghville (locals refer to it as "Over the Hump"). The neighborhood was named after John McDonogh. Before his death in 1850, McDonogh established "Freetown" for formerly enslaved people and other people of color. Freetown was renamed McDonoghville in 1815. When Algiers became a part of Orleans Parish in 1870, it became the largest populated black community on the West bank of the Mississippi River. Many Jazz artists such as Kid Thomas Valentine and Red Allen all grew up in McDonoghville section in Algiers during the 1910s.

Some of the early black neighborhoods included Riverview, Tunisbourg McCLendonville, LeBeoufville, Hendeeville, Oakdale, and Whitney. In 1938, L.B. Landry High School opened as the first all-black school in Algiers. The school was named after Dr. Lord Beaconsfield Landry, who lived in the area and died in 1934. It was also one of the first schools in New Orleans to serve African Americans.

Around the 1930s and early 1940s, several other schools and neighborhoods were built for blacks, including Peter S. Lawton School in Tunisbourg-McCLendonville and Oakdale. Oakdale once stood on the edge of Jefferson Parish and stretched from Whitney Avenue to the Mississippi River. It was destroyed in the late 1950s to make room for the Greater New Orleans Bridge.