Things to do in the Garden District

The Garden District is the anti-French Quarter: no Creole colonnades, just antebellum mansions built by nineteenth-century American merchants along St Charles Avenue, under a canopy of live oaks. The easiest way to see it is the St Charles streetcar, the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world, which runs the length of the avenue from the CBD.

Get off around Washington Avenue and walk the grid on foot; there is nothing to book and nothing opens on a schedule, since almost every house is a private residence viewed from the street. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, on Washington Avenue, holds above-ground tombs dating to 1833 and closes by around 3pm, well before dusk.

The adjoining Lower Garden District has fewer show mansions and more workaday shopfronts along Magazine Street.