New Orleans grew into the largest slave market in the antebellum United States, serving as the terminus for both the coastwise and overland domestic trade from the Upper South. Rather than hiding the trade away, the city staged some of its largest sales in plain view of visitors and residents, most notably beneath the ornate rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel and in the bar and exchange rooms of the rival St. Charles Hotel. Thousands of enslaved men, women, and children were sold there each year to supply the expanding cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South.