Buildings of Louisiana focuses on building forms unique to the state and shows others, such as plantation houses, in unexpected variety, including early houses influenced by Creole traditions and later ones that fit the columned Greek Revival image. Parlange in New Roads, Melrose...
Cradled in a curve of the Mississippi River and contained on the north by Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans has fluid boundaries; like an island, the city can be approached only over water. Its elevation is ten feet above sea level next to the river and well below sea level in many...
Modern-day Gretna was formed from three nineteenth-century communities: Mechanikham, Gretna, and McDonoghville. Mechanikham, laid out in 1836 by Nicolas Destrehan from a plan by Benjamin Buisson, consisted of a common (now Huey P. Long Avenue) stretching southeast from the...
Avondale was home to one of the nation’s biggest shipbuilding facilities and was once the largest employer in Louisiana. Established in 1938 as Avondale Marine Ways, it later became a unit of Northrop Grumman Corporation, then Huntington Ingalls; it closed in 2014. In its...
This suburb of New Orleans experienced phenomenal growth in the mid-twentieth century, although the area was rural throughout most of its earlier history. Because of the swampy nature of the soil, the remnants of the alluvial Metairie Ridge became the locus of the town’s...
In 1894, the Illinois Central Railroad established railroad yards and a roundhouse at what is now the town of Harahan, which was incorporated in 1920 and named for James T. Harahan, a former president of the railroad. In 1915, Harahan was linked to New Orleans by...
Kenner (first known as Kennerville) extends across the former plantation lands of Minor Kenner and William B. Kenner (brothers of Duncan F. Kenner of Ashland Plantation upriver in Ascension Parish; see Day Trip 2...
In the neutral ground of Louisiana 46 (near Paris Road) are several brick piers, the sole remains of Versailles, the sixteen-room plantation house built in 1805 by Pierre Denis de la Ronde, destroyed by fire in 1876. Extending from the ruins toward the river is the allee of...
The Vieux Carré (old square), also known as the French Quarter or simply the Quarter, was designed in an eleven-by-six-block gridiron plan. A public square, the Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square), faces the river and dates from the colonial period as a military parade ground...
New Orleans’s rapid expansion in the late eighteenth century led to growth beyond the Vieux Carré across Rampart Street to Faubourg Tremé and downriver to Faubourg Marigny, Bywater, and Holy Cross. Tremé, bounded roughly by N. Rampart, Canal, and N. Broad streets and Esplanade Avenue...
Marigny, Bywater, and Holy Cross follow the Mississippi River as it flows downstream. Parallel to them on the lake side of St. Claude Avenue are the neighborhoods of St. Roch, St. Claude, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Marigny, bounded by Esplanade and St....
Esplanade Avenue’s closely spaced houses, tall and narrow with side halls, and often built up to their property line, give the street a distinctive and sophisticated urban character. By the 1850s, when the Vieux Carré was becoming shabby, Creoles—often free...
Canal Street, 171 feet wide, extends 3.5 miles from the Mississippi River to the cemeteries on Metairie Ridge. As the city’s premier commercial boulevard, lower Canal—the blocks that separate the Vieux Carré from the Central Business District (originally the Faubourg St. Mary...
The abrupt and startling difference in scale between the low-rise Vieux Carré and the towering buildings of the business district on the opposite side of Canal Street highlights the contrasting histories of these two areas of New Orleans. What is now known as the...
Most of this primarily residential area of New Orleans upriver from the Central Business District comprises what was once the independent city of Lafayette and the seat of Jefferson Parish. It was annexed to New Orleans in 1852, and today...
New Orleans’s expansion upriver was encouraged, beginning in 1835, by the steam-powered New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, laid out along St. Charles Avenue and one of the nation’s first such transit lines. As elsewhere, a “resort” was at the terminus in the Carrollton suburb to...
Mid-City extends from Tremé and the Central Business District in a northwest direction toward the Metairie Ridge. Although the higher ground along the Metairie Ridge had been acquired for cemeteries as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the area’s development came in the...
The ranch-style houses that characterize many of the twentieth-century suburbs on the Lake Pontchartrain side of New Orleans are typical of those in residential neighborhoods throughout the United States. The oldest remnants of this area’s history are the fragments of the walls...
The elevated strip of land, known as Gentilly Ridge, that runs through this area was occupied by Native Americans before Europeans began to settle here in the eighteenth century. The surrounding swamps and marshes, however, were not drained until the...
Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite the Vieux Carré, was annexed by New Orleans in 1870. In the eighteenth century it was the site of the Company of the Indies’s first plantation, Louisiana’s first slave-trading depot, and New Orleans’s gunpowder magazines...
