Lonely Planet New Orleans , livre ebook

New Orleans

Contents

Plan Your Trip

Welcome to New Orleans
New Orleans’ Top 10
What’s New
Need to Know
First Time New Orleans
Top Itineraries
If You Like…
Month By Month
With Kids
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
LGBT+ New Orleans

Explore New Orleans

Neighborhoods at a Glance
French Quarter
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Mardi Gras & Jazz Fest
Faubourg Marigny & Bywater
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
CBD & Warehouse District
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
St Charles Avenue Streetcar
Garden, Lower Garden & Central City
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Uptown & Riverbend
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Mid-City, Bayou St John & City Park
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Tremé-Lafitte
Sights
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Entertainment
Shopping
Sports & Activities
Day Trips from New Orleans
River Road Plantions
Down the Bayou
St Francisville
Lafayette & Breaux Bridge
Cajun Prairie
Sleeping

Understand New Orleans

New Orleans Today
History
People of New Orleans
Architecture
Music
Environment

Survival Guide

Transportation
Arriving in New Orleans
Getting There & Away
Getting Around
Directory A–Z
Accessible Travel
Customs Regulations
Discount Cards
Electricity
Emergency
Health
Insurance
Internet Access
Legal Matters
Money
Opening Hours
Post
Public Holidays
Safe Travel
Taxes & Refunds
Telephone
Time
Toilets
Tourist Information
Visas
Volunteering
Women Travelers
Glossary
New Orleans Maps
French Quarter
Fauborg Marigny & Bywater
CBD & Warehouse District
Garden, Lower Garden & Central City
Uptown & Riverbend
Mid-City, Bayou St John & City Park
Tremé-Lafitte

Table of Contents

Behind the Scenes
Our Writers
Welcome to New Orleans

The things that make life worth living – eating, drinking and merrymaking – are the air that New Orleans breathes.

Epicurean Appetite
We hope you’re not reading this at home. We hope you’re in New Orleans, because you’re about to eat better than most others. When it comes to food, New Orleans does not fool around. Well, OK, it does: its playful attitude to ingredients and recipes mixes (for example) alligator sausage and cheesecake into a dessert fit for the gods. This sense of gastronomic play is rooted in both deep traditions – truly, this city has one of the few indigenous cuisines in the country – and, increasingly, a willingness to accommodate outside influences, both in terms of technique and ethnicity.

Celebration Seasons
We’re not exaggerating when we say there is either a festival or a parade every week of the year in New Orleans. Sometimes, such as during Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, it feels like there’s a new party for every hour of the day. At almost any celebration in town, people engage in masking – donning a new appearance via some form of costuming – while acting out the boisterous side of human behavior. But the celebrations and rituals of New Orleans are as much about history as hedonism, and every dance is as much an expression of tradition and community spirit as it is of joy.

Unceasing Song
New Orleans is the hometown of jazz, but neither the city nor the genre she birthed are musical museum pieces. Jazz is the root of American popular music, the daddy of rock, brother of the blues and not too distant ancestor of hip-hop – all styles of music that have defined the beat of global pop for decades. All these varieties of music, plus a few you may never have heard of, are practiced and played here on every corner, in any bar, every night of the week. Live music isn’t an event: it’s as crucial to the city soundscape as streetcar bells.

Candid Culture
There aren’t many places in the USA that wear their history as openly on their sleeves as New Orleans. This city’s very facade is an architectural study par excellence. And while cities like Boston and Charleston can boast beautiful buildings, New Orleans has an added lived-in grittiness that either feels intimidating or easily accessible. As a result of its visible history you’ll find a constant, often painful, dialogue with the past, stretching back hundreds of years. It’s a history that for all its controversy has produced a street culture that can be observed and grasped in a very visceral way.

Daniel Farrow performing at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter | KRIS DAVIDSON/LONELY PLANET ©

Why I Love New Orleans
By Adam Karlin
On those days when I can relax, New Orleans is there to ease me into the experience. I can have a few day drinks at a favorite bar, eat a meal at a corner restaurant, watch a parade or theater or music unfold in the street itself, and all the while be ensconced in an architectural pastiche that is simply heart-rending. Down here there’s beauty, for all the senses, all the time – but it’s a lived-in beauty, and it sets my heart right.
For more, see our writers
New Orleans’ Top 10

Loving Live Music
1 Music flows deep in the soul of New Orleans. Every beat, be it Cajun fiddle or brass-band drumline, measures out the rhythm of the cultures that came together to create this startlingly unique city. Frenchmen Street is packed with joints playing rock, metal, hip-hop, folk and, of course, jazz. If you can walk its few small blocks without hearing something you like, you may as well keep walking out of New Orleans, because the sound and the soul of this city are inextricably married.

CHUCK WAGNER/SHUTTERSTOCK ©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Creole Architecture
2 Looks aren’t always skin deep. In New Orleans the architectural skin is integral to the city’s spirit – and gives an undeniably distinctive sense of place. What immediately sets New Orleans apart from the USA is the architecture of the Creole faubourgs (‘fo-burgs’), or neighborhoods. This includes the shaded porches of the French Quarter, of course, but also filigreed Marigny homes, candy-colored Bywater cottages and the grand manses of Esplanade Ave (pictured). Look down streets in these areas and you’ll know, intuitively and intensely, that you are in New Orleans.

FOTOLUMINATE LLC/SHUTTERSTOCK ©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Mardi Gras
3 There’s spectacle, and then there’s Mardi Gras. On Fat Tuesday, the most fantastic costumes, the weirdest pageantry, West African rituals, Catholic liturgy, homegrown traditions, massive parade floats, and a veritable river of booze all culminate in the single most exhausting and exhilarating day of your life. At all times of year, New Orleans is a feast for the senses, but she becomes a veritable all-you-can-eat banquet during Carnival time, and achieves a sort of apotheosis of hedonism come Mardi Gras day.

GTS PRODUCTIONS/SHUTTERSTOCK ©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Eating a Po’boy
4 If by ‘sandwich’ we mean a portable meal that contains vegetable and meat enclosed by starch, the po’boy is perfection, the Platonic ideal of sandwiches. But let’s get to the detail: its fresh filling (roast beef or fried seafood are the most common, but the possibilities are endless), tomatoes, lettuce, onion, mayo, pickles and a perfect loaf of not-quite-French bread. The ideal po’boy is elusive: try Mahony’s on Magazine St, Domilise’s Po-boys Uptown or Parkway in Mid-City.

Oyster po’boy | NINETTE MAUMUS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO ©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Drinking Classic Cocktails
5 A significant case could be made that the cocktail, a blend of spirits mixed into something delicious and dangerous, was invented in New Orleans. Bitters, long considered a crucial component of any cocktail, is the homegrown creation of a French Quarter pharmacy. When someone calls a drink a ‘classic cocktail,’ it’s because local bartenders have been making it here for centuries. The ultimate New Orleans drink is the Sazerac (pictured); it can be enjoyed at any time of day, but always adds a touch of class.

BRENT HOFACKER/ SHUTTERSTOCK©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Second Lines
6 New Orleans is a city that loves to celebrate, but you don’t have to wait for a specific day on the calendar to throw down. Second Lines – neighborhood parades thrown by African American civic organizations known as Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs – are weekly parades that kick off every Sunday outside of summer. Folks gather somewhere in the city (often in Tremé); a band leads the way, dancers parade in their finest clothes, and the Second Line – a following crowd, which should include you – high steps behind.

SUZANNE C. GRIM/ SHUTTERSTOCK©

New Orleans’ Top 10
Crescent Park
7 The Mississippi River has long been the defining geographic feature of New Orleans, but for years, it lacked a park that truly allowed for quiet enjoyment of the waterfront (the path that edges the French Quarter has always been too busy for contemplation). No longer. Crescent Park not only links the Marigny to Bywater; it showcases, via a mix of green landscaping and austere metallic installations, both the watery might of the Mississippi and the gothic edges of old riverfront industrial facilities.

SASHA WELEBER/GETTY IMAGES ©

New Orleans’ Top 10
St Charles Avenue Streetcar
8 Some of the grandest homes in the USA line St Charles Ave, shaded by enormous live oak trees that glitter with the tossed beads of hundreds of Mardi Gras floats. Underneath in the shade, joggers pace themselves along the grassy ‘neutral ground’ (median) while Tulane kids flirt with Loyola friends. Clanging through this bucolic corridor comes the St Charles Avenue Streetcar, a mobile bit of urban transportation history, bearing tourists and commuters along a street as importan