New Orleans: Garden District & Magazine Street

You're standing in front of the most influential restaurant in America — or at least the one with the strongest argument for the title. Commander's Palace sits on the corner of Washington Avenue and Coliseum Street, and it looks exactly the way a grand Creole restaurant should look: a turquoise-and-white Victorian mansion with wrap-around galleries, hanging ferns, and just enough eccentricity in the trim work to remind you that this is New Orleans and not Charleston.

The building dates to around eighteen eighty, when the Garden District was at the height of its wealth and self-assurance, and a restaurant at this corner was the obvious place for the Uptown establishment to celebrate itself. Commander's Palace took its current form under the Brennan family, who bought it in nineteen seventy-four and turned it into something entirely its own — formal enough for weddings and business deals, loose enough to serve Jazz Brunch with a brass trio walking between the tables and a dress code that has historically been enforced with good humor rather than rigidity.

Cross Washington Avenue and step through the iron gates directly opposite the restaurant. Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 is one of the most atmospheric places in New Orleans, which is saying a great deal in a city that does atmosphere professionally. The cemetery was established in eighteen thirty-three by the municipality of Lafayette, which at the time was a separate city from New Orleans — the Garden District was Uptown, and the American newcomers who built it incorporated their own government before eventually merging with the older Creole city downstream.

Above-ground burial in New Orleans is not tradition for tradition's sake. It is engineering. The city sits on the saturated alluvial plain of the Mississippi River delta, at or below sea level for most of its extent. The soil is not soil in any conventional sense — it is a waterlogged mixture of silt, clay, and organic matter that behaves more like a sponge than solid ground. Early colonial attempts at conventional burial resulted in the dead returning: wooden coffins absorbed ground water, swelled, and pushed back to the surface during heavy rains. The French solved this practically. Brick vaults, sealed with stucco, keep the dead in place. The Louisiana sun does the rest. A sealed brick vault in summer reaches temperatures well above the boiling point of water, which means that within a year or so, a body interred here has been reduced to dry remains, and the vault can receive the next family member. New Orleans families have been sharing tombs across generations for two centuries.

Walk east a few blocks toward the river to Coliseum Square, one of the older public spaces in the neighborhood. The square itself is modest — a narrow park with live oaks, a fountain, and benches where the neighborhood gathers on mild evenings — but the streets surrounding it tell the story of how the Garden District's sister neighborhood, the Lower Garden District, came into being.

This area was developed slightly before the core Garden District, in the eighteen twenties and thirties, when the land between the French Quarter and the new American suburb Uptown was being subdivided and sold. The street names here — Coliseum, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Polymnia, Calliope — are named for the nine muses of Greek mythology, a naming convention imposed by surveyors who were apparently classically educated and somewhat optimistic about the cultural ambitions of the new neighborhood. Locals do not use these names with any particular reverence. Calliope Street, for instance, is pronounced 'CAL-ee-ope' in New Orleans, and if you correct them they will be polite about it and continue saying it their way.

Make your way to Prytania Street and walk uptown. This is the heart of the Garden District's mansion row, and it earns the description. What you're looking at along this stretch of Prytania — and on the parallel streets of Coliseum, Camp, and Chestnut — represents the concentrated wealth of antebellum America's cotton and sugar economy, rendered in wood and plaster and ornamental ironwork on a scale that was intended to announce exactly how much money the owners had and how recently they had acquired it.

The Garden District was built almost entirely by Americans — Anglo-Protestant merchants, lawyers, and planters who arrived in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase of eighteen oh three and found themselves unwelcome in the Creole French Quarter. The Creoles, who had been building their world along the river for a century, spoke French, practiced Catholicism, and operated under Napoleonic legal traditions. They were not enthusiastic about their new American neighbors, and they made that clear through social exclusion and residential zoning that kept Americans on the other side of Canal Street, which functioned as a genuine cultural border. The Americans, not to be out-done, bought the plantation land upriver and built their own neighborhood, with their own houses, larger and more ostentatious than anything in the Quarter.

Turn onto First Street and look for the imposing white Greek Revival mansion at number twelve thirty-nine. This house is associated with Anne Rice, the New Orleans novelist who was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in nineteen forty-one in the Uptown neighborhood, grew up in the city, left for several decades, and returned in nineteen eighty-eight to buy this house — built around eighteen fifty-seven — and live in it until two thousand and four.

Rice is best known for Interview with the Vampire, published in nineteen seventy-six, which launched her Vampire Chronicles series and permanently altered the popular conception of what vampire fiction could be. But it is her relationship with New Orleans that makes her relevant to this street. Rice used the city — its above-ground cemeteries, its Garden District mansions, its particular atmosphere of beautiful decay, its layered history of Creole and American and African cultures living in close proximity — as both setting and inspiration for the better part of her career. Her vampire Lestat de Lioncourt is, in many ways, a Garden District figure: ancien regime aristocracy with excessive wealth, uncertain morality, and a complicated relationship with mortality. It fits the neighborhood.

Walk to the corner of Prytania and Fourth Street, where you'll find the oldest standing house in the Garden District. This structure is known as Toby's Corner, built around eighteen thirty-eight for Thomas Toby, a Philadelphia merchant who came to New Orleans to make his fortune and succeeded well enough to build on this corner before the neighborhood around him had fully taken shape.

The house is a good example of the Greek Revival raised cottage style that was the default domestic architecture for prosperous Americans in New Orleans during the eighteen thirties and forties: the main living floor elevated on a high basement to catch the river breeze and avoid the dampness of the ground, a wide front porch supported by simple Doric columns, symmetrical windows on either side of a centered front door. The design is sensible and well-proportioned in a way that the more extravagant mansions built a decade later sometimes are not. There is a restraint to it that reads as an earlier moment in American confidence — the style of people who were establishing themselves, not people who were already certain of their own importance.

Make your way to St. Charles Avenue and stand at the streetcar stop. Listen for the clang of the bell before you see it — the Perley Thomas cars announce themselves before they arrive, a sound that has been part of the rhythm of this street for as long as anyone in New Orleans can remember.

The St. Charles streetcar line began operation in eighteen thirty-five, making it the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world. That claim requires a moment to consider. Eighteen thirty-five: Andrew Jackson was president, Texas had not yet won its independence from Mexico, the transcontinental railroad was three decades away, and this streetcar was already running. The line has operated without interruption for nearly two centuries, surviving the Civil War, yellow fever epidemics, the conversion from horse power to steam and then to electricity, the rise and fall of the automobile's dominance over American streets, and Hurricane Katrina, which damaged the line so severely that buses replaced the streetcars for three years while repairs were made.

Ride the streetcar further uptown — or walk if the morning is cool enough — to Audubon Park, the large public green space that occupies the land between St. Charles Avenue and the Mississippi River. The park was established in eighteen seventy-one on the site of the Foucher and Bore sugar plantations, and it takes its name from John James Audubon, the ornithologist and artist who lived in New Orleans in the eighteen twenties while working on The Birds of America, his monumental illustrated catalogue of North American bird species.

Audubon is one of those figures whose life is more complicated than the celebrations suggest. He was born in Saint-Domingue — present-day Haiti — in seventeen eighty-five, the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and a Creole chambermaid. He grew up in France, emigrated to America, failed repeatedly as a businessman, and supported his obsessive bird-watching and painting career partly through the labor of enslaved people. His connection to New Orleans is documented and genuine: he taught drawing to wealthy Creole families here, used the city's access to Gulf Coast bird species to advance his cataloguing work, and understood Louisiana's wetlands as among the richest bird habitats in North America.

Continue along St. Charles Avenue to the back-to-back campuses of Tulane University and Loyola University of New Orleans. They sit directly adjacent to each other, their gates almost touching, which creates an unusual academic geography — a Jesuit Catholic university and a research university operating in such close physical proximity that students from each institution can walk to the other's library in three minutes.

Tulane was founded in eighteen thirty-four as the Medical College of Louisiana, making it one of the oldest universities in the Deep South. It became Tulane University in eighteen eighty-four after a substantial endowment from Paul Tulane, a New Jersey-born merchant who made his fortune in New Orleans and left the bulk of it to education. The university's academic strength has historically been in medicine, law, and public health — fields where its location in a subtropical port city at the mouth of the Mississippi provided unique clinical and research material. Tulane's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine has been studying the diseases of the Gulf South since the yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century.

Walk or ride back toward the Garden District and find Magazine Street, the long commercial corridor that runs roughly parallel to St. Charles Avenue between the neighborhood's residential blocks and the Mississippi River. Magazine Street is six miles long and contains something close to the full spectrum of New Orleans commercial culture: antique shops with nineteenth-century furniture and European silverware stacked to the ceiling, boutiques selling locally designed clothing, po-boy shops where the bread is a specific New Orleans French bread that does not exist outside the city, coffee shops, art galleries, bars with their doors open to the street, and the kind of hardware store that still stocks things you cannot find anywhere else.

The name comes from the French word for warehouse — magasin — and the street was indeed the warehouse district for early New Orleans, running along the riverfront where goods moved in and out of the city. The warehouses gradually became shops, the shops became the strip, and the strip became the neighborhood institution that Magazine Street is today. Unlike Bourbon Street, which is a tourist experience, Magazine Street is where locals actually shop and eat, which makes it a useful corrective at the end of a tour that has spent considerable time in the grander precincts of the neighborhood.