New Orleans

Top things to do in New Orleans

1. 01

   The French Quarter - Jackson Square, the cathedral and the Vieux Carre grid

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   Thirteen blocks by six of the original 1720s street plan, though almost nothing French survives it: fires in 1788 and 1794 flattened the town and the Spanish rebuilt it in brick and tile around courtyards, which is why the Quarter looks like Havana rather than Quebec. Jackson Square has the cathedral, the Cabildo and Presbytere flanking it and the Pontalba apartment rows down each side, with the levee promenade behind. Royal Street is the antiques, galleries and street musicians, Decatur runs down to the French Market and the beignet stand at Cafe du Monde, and Bourbon Street is the neon and daiquiri machines that give the whole neighbourhood its reputation. Walk the residential blocks below St Ann towards Esplanade to see what the rest of it is actually like.

2. 02

   Frenchmen Street - the music strip locals send you to instead of Bourbon

   nightlife music culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Three blocks in the Faubourg Marigny, just over Esplanade from the Quarter, with a dozen rooms within a two-minute walk of each other and music running most nights of the week. The long-standing anchors are the Spotted Cat for trad jazz and swing with no stage to speak of, Snug Harbor as the proper sit-down listening room for modern jazz, and d.b.a. for brass bands and rhythm and blues; the line-up of rooms shifts over the years but the density does not. Some places charge a cover and some pass a bucket, sets run late, and the outdoor art market halfway along stays open into the night.

3. 03

   Creole and Cajun cooking - gumbo, po-boys, and red beans on a Monday

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   The dishes to chase are the local ones: gumbo built on a dark roux and thickened with okra or file, red beans and rice on Mondays because Monday was wash day, shrimp or crawfish etouffee, jambalaya, char-grilled oysters, boiled crawfish through the spring, turtle soup and shrimp remoulade in the old-line Creole dining rooms, and a barbecue shrimp that involves no barbecue at all. Bread matters here: po-boys need the local French loaf with the shattering crust and cotton interior, and the muffuletta is a round Sicilian sesame loaf packed with cured meats and olive salad, invented at the immigrant grocery counters on Decatur Street. Beignets and chicory cafe au lait close the night or start the morning. Magazine Street, Freret and Mid-City carry the neighbourhood kitchens; the Quarter and the Warehouse District hold the grand ones.

4. 04

   The National WWII Museum - the country's official museum of the war

   history 👍 Popular

   A campus of pavilions in the Warehouse District, in New Orleans because Higgins Industries built the flat-bottomed landing craft that put troops onto the beaches here in the city. The core is the Road to Berlin and Road to Tokyo halls, which walk you campaign by campaign with an issued dog tag whose story you follow, plus a hangar of hanging aircraft, a submarine control room, and a wide-screen film in the theatre. The oral history recordings are the part people remember. Give it most of a day; it is far bigger than it looks from the street.

5. 05

   St Charles Avenue streetcar - the olive-green cars up the oak avenue

   scenic history 👍 Popular

   The line has been carrying passengers since the 1830s and is generally called the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world; the cars are 1920s Perley Thomas machines with mahogany seats, brass fittings and windows you shove up by hand. It runs from Canal Street through the Central Business District, up the length of the Garden District under the oaks and past the mansions, along Audubon Park and the two universities to the Riverbend at Carrollton. Riding the whole way and walking back is a legitimate afternoon. The Canal Street, Riverfront and Rampart lines use newer red cars and are useful rather than lovely.

6. 06

   Garden District and Magazine Street - mansions above, shopping below

   history shopping

   When Americans arrived after the Louisiana Purchase the Creole city would not have them, so they built their own upriver on a subdivided plantation, one enormous house per generous lot with a garden around it rather than the Quarter's wall-to-wall street front. The blocks bounded by Prytania, Coliseum, First and Third are the densest run of Greek revival and Italianate piles, and the iron cornstalk fence is the one everybody photographs. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 sits in the middle of it and has had long closures for restoration, so do not build a day around getting inside. Magazine Street runs six miles parallel to the river a few blocks below, low-rise nineteenth-century shopfronts full of antiques, secondhand books, boutiques, coffee and some of the best neighbourhood eating in the city.

7. 07

   Preservation Hall - traditional jazz in a bare room

   nightlife music history

   A small unadorned room on St Peter Street, founded in the early 1960s to protect the old New Orleans players when the style was out of fashion, and run on the same terms since: wooden benches and standing room at the back, no air conditioning worth the name, short sets several times a night and a queue on the pavement outside. The music is the traditional repertoire played by people who learned it directly from the previous generation. Requests for a certain very famous saint-themed number are, by long tradition, treated as a negotiation rather than a favour.

8. 08

   St Louis Cemetery No. 1 - the above-ground tombs

   history culture arts

   Burying in a city with the water table a metre down never worked, so New Orleans stacked its dead in above-ground vaults of brick and plaster, laid out in narrow lanes that visitors have called cities of the dead since the 1800s. The oldest surviving one is a few blocks behind the Quarter and holds the tomb attributed to Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century Voodoo priestess whose grave was defaced often enough that the archdiocese now restricts entry to descendants and licensed guides, so you go with a tour or not at all. Metairie Cemetery out towards the lake is the grand version, full of marble mausoleums laid out on a former racetrack, and open to wander on your own.

9. 09

   City Park - live oaks, the art museum and the sculpture garden

   culture arts nature wildlife

   Bigger than Central Park and far quieter, with one of the largest stands of mature live oaks anywhere, some of them centuries old and propped up on their own limbs. The New Orleans Museum of Art anchors the Esplanade end with a strong holding of French painting, Louisiana work and African art, and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden beside it winds through lagoons and Spanish moss with about ninety pieces in it. There is also a 1900s carousel with hand-carved horses under a wooden pavilion, a fairy-tale sculpture park for small children, canoe hire on the lagoons and a beignet stand. Bayou St John runs along the edge, the old high ground where the city first reached inland.

10. 10

    Congo Square and Louis Armstrong Park - where the music comes from

    history culture arts

    Under French and Spanish rule enslaved people had Sundays free, and they gathered on this open ground at the back of the Quarter to drum, dance, sing and trade in the African rhythms that colonial law had suppressed almost everywhere else in North America. That unbroken thread is the reason jazz happened here and not somewhere else. The square is now inside Louis Armstrong Park, with the Mahalia Jackson theatre beside it, and the Treme neighbourhood behind, one of the oldest Black neighbourhoods in the country, holds the small museum of Mardi Gras Indian suits, jazz funerals and social aid and pleasure clubs that explains the whole street culture better than anything else in town.

11. 11

    Second lines and the Black Masking Indians - the parades that are not for tourists

    culture arts off beaten path

    Social aid and pleasure clubs, which began as mutual-aid burial societies, put on a parade nearly every Sunday afternoon through most of the year, hiring a brass band and walking a neighbourhood route for hours; the club is the first line and everybody who falls in behind is the second line. The same tradition supplies the jazz funeral, with the dirge out and the up-tempo release back. Separately, the Black Masking Indians, or Mardi Gras Indians, spend the year hand-sewing beaded suits of enormous weight and meet in the street to confront each other in song on a handful of days. Routes are announced locally rather than advertised, nobody is performing for you, and standing at the back respectfully is entirely welcome.

12. 12

    The Presbytere - Carnival upstairs, Katrina downstairs

    history culture arts

    The state museum in the twin building beside the cathedral runs two permanent exhibitions and they make an unusually good pair. Upstairs is Carnival: the krewe structure, the throws, the hand-sewn Indian suits and the float and costume design that the city works on all year. Downstairs is the hurricane exhibition, which uses salvaged objects, rooftop axes and recorded testimony to tell what happened when the levees failed in 2005, and it is done plainly and without sentiment. If you only enter one museum in the Quarter, this is the one. Mardi Gras World, in a working warehouse on the river downstream, is the other half of the Carnival story: sculptors and painters building next year's floats while you walk through.

13. 13

    Algiers Point ferry, the levee and Crescent Park

    scenic nature wildlife

    The passenger ferry from the foot of Canal Street crosses to Algiers Point in about ten minutes and gives you the only good view back at the crescent of the river and the skyline; Algiers itself is a quiet nineteenth-century village of pastel cottages with a levee path and a couple of bars. On the city side the Moonwalk and Woldenberg Park put you right on the water in the Quarter, ocean-going ships pass close enough to read, and Crescent Park downriver in the Bywater runs two kilometres along the wharves with an arched rust-red footbridge over the tracks at Piety Street. A steamboat with a working calliope still runs harbour cruises from the Quarter.

14. 14

    The cocktail bars - Sazerac, Ramos gin fizz and Vieux Carre

    nightlife music food

    New Orleans has a decent claim on the American cocktail: Peychaud's bitters were mixed in a Quarter apothecary in the 1830s, the Sazerac of rye, sugar, those bitters and an absinthe rinse is the city's own drink and the state's official one, and the Ramos gin fizz was whipped up in a bar here to a recipe that needs twelve minutes of shaking. The Vieux Carre was invented in a slowly revolving carousel bar in a Quarter hotel, the brandy milk punch is the acceptable breakfast, and the frozen rum drink in a hurricane-lamp glass is the tourist one that locals will still admit to. Open containers are legal on the street in a plastic go-cup, glass is not, and bars here have no legal closing time.

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