Lafayette Cemetery and the Garden District

The Garden District was laid out in the first half of the nineteenth century as part of the city of Lafayette, then a separate town upriver from New Orleans that was later absorbed into the growing city. It was settled largely by wealthy Americans who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase and preferred to build here rather than in the older, French- and Spanish-flavored French Quarter, and their fortunes raised the mansions that still line the streets.

This part of the Mississippi River crescent was long the homeland of the Chitimacha, Houma, and other Native peoples of the lower delta, and New Orleans itself grew from a French colonial founding in 1718 on that ground. The city's later wealth, including the fortunes behind many Garden District homes, was deeply tied to slavery and the sugar and cotton trades, a history that runs beneath the neighborhood's beauty.

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 was established in the 1830s to serve the growing community, and it holds people from many of the cultures that made New Orleans, buried in family tombs and in the wall vaults that ring the grounds. In the city's crowded nineteenth century it saw waves of burials during epidemics of yellow fever and other diseases that swept the port.

The above-ground tombs are a practical answer to a high water table, but they also created the distinctive look that draws visitors: rows of whitewashed and weathered vaults, some sprouting ferns and stained by time, arranged along narrow lanes. Novelists and filmmakers have long been drawn here, and the writer Anne Rice set scenes from her New Orleans stories among these tombs, cementing the cemetery's place in the city's gothic imagination.

Out beyond the cemetery wall, the Garden District is an open-air museum of nineteenth-century architecture, from Greek Revival columns to Italianate and Queen Anne detailing. The homes sit behind cast-iron fences on lots planted with camellias, magnolias, and sprawling live oaks whose limbs arch over the streets. Because the houses are private, the pleasure is in a slow walk, reading the details and imagining the eras that built them.

The St. Charles Avenue streetcar, one of the oldest continuously operating streetcar lines in the world, rumbles along the neighborhood's edge beneath a tunnel of oaks. Riding it to the Garden District, then walking in to the cemetery and out along Magazine Street with its cafes and shops, makes for one of the most rewarding half-days in New Orleans.

The best way to experience this corner of New Orleans is on foot and unhurried. Start at the cemetery on Washington Avenue, then wander the surrounding blocks to take in the mansions, pausing in the shade of the oaks when the heat rises. A guided walking tour can bring out the stories behind particular houses and tombs if you want more than the view.

Magazine Street, a few blocks toward the river, offers a stretch of shops, galleries, and restaurants to round out the day, and the streetcar is always waiting to carry you back toward downtown. The whole neighborhood rewards patience, and it makes a gentle, beautiful counterpoint to the busier French Quarter.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.