5 Days in New Orleans

Jackson Square was the town's parade ground, the Place d'Armes, and it is where Louisiana changed flags in 1803, from Spain to France and then, three weeks later, from France to the United States. The equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson went up in 1856, and the two red-brick Pontalba apartment buildings on the sides were built by a baroness, Micaela Almonester de Pontalba, who also laid out the iron fences and walkways of the square you see today.

The cathedral at the head of the square is, together with a chapel in Monterey, California, the oldest cathedral in continuous use in the United States. The first church on the site dates from 1718, the second burned in the fire of 1788, and the building you see is mostly an 1850s rebuilding of the 1789 church. Walk the square once and step inside. Tarot readers, painters and brass bands fill the fence; tip anyone whose photo you take.

The two matching buildings on either side of the cathedral are the Louisiana State Museum. The Cabildo was the Spanish city hall, rebuilt between 1795 and 1799 after the fire, and the transfer ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase took place here in 1803. The Louisiana Supreme Court sat in the building from 1868 to 1910, and the case of Homer Plessy, who challenged segregated railway cars, came through its courtroom. The Presbytère, built to match it on the other side of the cathedral, was finished in 1813 and is the second museum of the pair.

If you only have time for one, pick the Cabildo: the 1803 handover and the city's court history sit in the same rooms.

Café du Monde has stood on the edge of the French Market since 1862, and it is the oldest coffee stand in the city. The menu is almost unchanged: coffee with chicory (a Civil War habit, when real coffee ran short), café au lait, and beignets, which come three to an order under a cloud of powdered sugar. The French Market around it has been a market since the 1790s, and its oldest surviving buildings date from about 1813.

Sit down and do not wear black: the sugar goes everywhere. Walk the market afterwards; the flea market part is busiest at weekends, and the National Park Service has a jazz visitor center there.

The muffuletta is said to have been born here in 1906. Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian immigrant, sold Italian groceries on Decatur Street and made his farmers' lunch: a round sesame loaf, split, soaked in olive salad and stacked with salami, ham, mortadella, provolone and Swiss. The store is still in the same family, now its third generation, and the official site says it is open seven days a week from 9am to 5pm after rebuilding following hurricane damage.

A half is enough for two, a whole for three. Take it to a bench by the river and keep napkins close, because the oil gets everywhere.

A 20-minute walk toward Canal Street, on the edge of the Quarter, is the Sazerac House, a museum of New Orleans cocktails run by the company that owns the Sazerac brand. The free tour is self-guided and includes three complimentary samples for guests 21 and over, a sensible way to learn the drink (recipe under Food, below). The one-hour guided Legacy Tour costs 35 USD (31 EUR).

Preservation Hall began in 1961 in an art gallery on St. Peter Street whose owner, Larry Borenstein, let jazz musicians play for tips. Allan and Sandra Jaffe, visiting after their honeymoon, took over that September, and it has played traditional New Orleans jazz nightly ever since. The room is small and unadorned, with a few benches, and the bands are made up of working New Orleans musicians.

It is the right place to hear the roots of everything you will hear later in the week, and it is the opposite of Bourbon Street. Tickets are sold online only, cash is not accepted at the door, photos and recordings are not allowed, and the hall is open to all ages. The calendar shows several short sets between about 5pm and 9pm, so book the earliest set if you want dinner after.

Pat O'Brien's has served legally since 1933 (on St. Peter Street since 1942) and made the Hurricane famous. The story is that in the 1940s liquor salesmen made bars buy cases of rum to get a little scotch, so the bar poured the surplus into a hurricane-lamp-shaped glass. It is sweet and strong, and one is a rite of passage, not a habit.

Bourbon Street starts a block away and is the loud, drunk, cheap version of the city. Walk it once, then go elsewhere to listen: Frenchmen Street on day three is the better night.

The St. Charles line has run since 1835 and is the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world. The green cars start at Canal Street, run along St. Charles Avenue under the live oaks, pass the Garden District and Audubon Park and Tulane and Loyola, and end 6 miles later in Carrollton. It is both public transport and the best sightseeing ride in the city.

Board at the Canal Street end, sit by an open window, and get off at Washington Avenue for the Garden District. Pay with exact cash, a Jazzy Pass or the Le Pass app. It's slow, and that is the point.

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 opened in 1833 as the city's first planned cemetery, laid out in a cross so funeral processions could move through it. About 1,100 family tombs hold roughly 7,000 people. The tombs stand above ground because of the high water table and the French and Spanish custom of wall tombs. The city closed the cemetery to visitors in September 2019 and the gates reopened on 1 October 2026 for guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center's Save Our Cemeteries program, in groups of up to 16 and with six sessions a day.

Many Garden District walking tours stop at the gates without going in, so check that your tour goes inside. The cemetery was a set for Interview with the Vampire, whose author, Anne Rice, lived nearby.

The Garden District was laid out from 1832 on old plantation land by and for the wealthy Americans who had arrived after the Louisiana Purchase and did not want to live among the Creoles in the French Quarter. Big Greek Revival and Italianate houses sit in their own gardens, a couple per block, and the whole thing is a National Historic Landmark district. The Creole city and the American city were rivals, and these streets are the American side of that argument.

Walk First, Prytania, Third and Fourth streets. Colonel Short's Villa on Fourth Street (1859) has the cornstalk-shaped iron fence, was seized by Union forces in 1862 and briefly served as the executive mansion of Louisiana's Union-installed governor. The Brevard-Rice House at 1239 First Street dates from 1857. The houses are private, so look from the sidewalk.

Across the street from the cemetery, Commander's Palace has been serving since Emile Commander opened a saloon on the corner in 1893. A few years later it was a restaurant for the neighborhood's wealthy families, and the Brennan family has run it since the 1970s. It is one of the best-known Creole dining rooms in the city, which makes it the natural lunch after a morning among the tombs.

Lunch runs Wednesday to Friday from 11:30am, so Friday works. Reserve, and dress up: the code is business attire, jackets preferred for men, no shorts, T-shirts or flip-flops, jeans discouraged. It is old-fashioned, not cheap, and exactly what the Garden District should be. If it is booked out, Magazine Street has plenty of simpler lunches.

Two blocks from Commander's Palace, Magazine Street follows the river's curve for miles, lined with antique shops, boutiques and small restaurants in low houses. It is where locals shop, and the stretch near Washington Avenue is the easy one to walk.

Audubon Park covers about 350 acres between St. Charles Avenue and the Mississippi, directly across from Loyola and Tulane. The land was part of the Boré and Foucher sugar plantations before the city bought it in 1871, and the park is named after the naturalist John James Audubon, who began living in New Orleans in 1821. Today it is a big, flat park for walking under the oaks, a good place to slow down for an hour.

Near the end of the streetcar line, on Oak Street just off Carrollton Avenue, the Maple Leaf has hosted live music since 1974, one of the longest-running clubs in the city, with a different band most nights.

Shows are ticketed, so check the calendar for doors and start times; Rebirth Brass Band is among the bar's frequent performers, so look for brass. Take the streetcar back to Canal Street afterwards, or a taxi if it is late.

Opened in 1789, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the oldest cemetery in the city, a single block of crowded white tombs on Basin Street. People buried here include Étienne de Boré, the first mayor; Homer Plessy of the Plessy v. Ferguson case; and, according to tradition, the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau in the Glapion family tomb. Nicolas Cage bought a pyramid-shaped tomb here in 2010.

Since 1 March 2015 the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which owns the cemetery, has closed it to the general public, citing vandalism. You can enter only with a guide registered with the archdiocese, and tour companies pay for access, which has been controversial. The nonprofit Save Our Cemeteries runs tours, as do commercial operators. Book a morning tour before you leave home.

Across Rampart Street from the Quarter, Congo Square is the open ground where, on Sundays under the French and Spanish, enslaved Africans were allowed to gather, trade and dance. In 1817 the city ordered that these gatherings could take place only here, which is how the square got its fame. The rhythms played here are still heard in second lines, jazz funerals and the Mardi Gras Indians' parades, and many historians see it as one of the places where African American music began.

The park around it was created in the 1970s after urban renewal levelled part of the Tremé neighborhood, and the first Jazz Fest was held here in 1970. It can feel quiet and a little empty, but it is the historical point of the whole day. A free Congo Square Rhythms Festival is held in late March.

Walking back toward the Quarter, Antoine's on St. Louis Street is one of the old-line Creole restaurants of the French Quarter. Its site lists lunch Monday to Saturday from 11:30am to 2pm under its fall and holiday hours, so it fits between the cemetery and the Tremé afternoon.

Order a classic Creole dish and ask the waiter what is best that day. It is a formal sit-down meal, not a quick bite.

The Backstreet Cultural Museum, at 1531 St. Philip Street, opened in 1999. Its founder, Sylvester Francis, started filming Carnival parades, second lines and jazz funerals three decades earlier, after a photographer asked him to pay 35 USD for a photo of his own parade. The museum now holds the beaded and feathered suits of the Mardi Gras Indians, the outfits of social aid and pleasure clubs and the films.

This is where you learn that Mardi Gras is not just beads on Bourbon Street. It is a neighborhood tradition, carried by Black communities that make new suits and parade in them each year. It is a small museum in a house: ask questions and treat it as a place that matters to its neighbors.

A few blocks away on Governor Nicholls Street, St. Augustine Church was dedicated in 1842, built by free people of color and said to be the oldest Black Catholic parish in the United States. When white parishioners reserved the best pews, the free people of color bought extra pews so enslaved people could sit in the church too.

Go in if it is open, or look from outside. Tremé, founded in the 1810s, was at first the main neighborhood of the city's free people of color.

Frenchmen Street, in the Faubourg Marigny, is where New Orleans musicians play for locals. A three-block stretch has developed since the 1980s as the center of live-music venues. The Spotted Cat Music Club, at 623, says it is open seven days a week from 2pm to 2am, and brass bands, swing, jazz and funk move from room to room.

Walk the three blocks, stick your head into the clubs and stay where the sound is best. This is the answer to Bourbon Street.

The museum was founded in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum, and the reason it is in New Orleans is that Andrew Higgins built the landing craft, the Higgins boat, here. Eisenhower told the historian Stephen Ambrose that Higgins had won the war for us, and Ambrose, from New Orleans, started the museum. Congress named it America's official National WWII Museum in 2003, and it is a Smithsonian affiliate.

It is far bigger than a morning, so choose the galleries that interest you and stop before you are numb. Open daily 9am to 5pm; closed on Mardi Gras Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Willie Mae's Scotch House opened in Tremé in 1957 and became famous for its fried chicken. Today the family's restaurant on Baronne Street, Willie Mae's NOLA, is in the Warehouse District, a short walk from the museum, and the website lists it as open every day except Tuesday.

Order the fried chicken, and be ready to wait at peak lunchtimes. It is a different room from the Tremé original, but a practical lunch before the streetcar.

RTA route 48, the Canal Streetcar to City Park, runs up the wide median of Canal Street and ends close to the art museum. It is a plainer, more local ride than the St. Charles line.

Walk from the museum to Canal Street (about 15-20 minutes), or take the St. Charles streetcar. A 1-day Jazzy Pass lasts one day only, so if you will ride on days two to four, the 3-day pass is the better buy.

The New Orleans Museum of Art opened in 1911 as the Delgado Museum of Art, funded by a sugar broker, Isaac Delgado, and it is the oldest fine-arts museum in the city. It sits in City Park, and the collection is good enough to spend two hours on. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden next door is free and open seven days a week, with its sculptures among lagoons and oaks.

City Park itself covers 1,300 acres and is described as holding the world's largest collection of mature live oaks, some older than 600 years. In the 1800s it was a place for duels, and the Dueling Oak stands near the museum. Visitors 19 and under are free. Leave time at the end to walk under the oaks.

Back in the Quarter, a ten-minute walk from where the streetcar drops you on Canal Street, the Napoleon House at 500 Chartres Street was built in 1794 and enlarged in 1814 for Nicholas Girod, mayor of New Orleans. The legend is that it was meant as a refuge for Napoleon, and that the plan to bring him to Louisiana was dropped when news of his death in 1821 arrived. True or not, the building has been a restaurant since 1914, and it plays classical music in the bar.

Order the Pimm's Cup, the house cocktail, and a half muffuletta or a bowl of gumbo. Its website lists daily hours from 11am to 10pm.

Whitney Plantation opened to the public in December 2014, and unlike most plantations on the River Road it is built around slavery rather than around the big house. It was founded in 1752 by a German immigrant, Ambroise Heidal. A New Orleans trial lawyer, John Cummings, spent 20 years and more than 10 million USD creating the museum, which memorializes the more than 100,000 men, women and children who were enslaved in Louisiana.

The grounds hold memorials, life-size sculptures of enslaved children and the big house, and the story is told from the point of view of the enslaved, drawing on the testimony of survivors interviewed in the 1930s. Guided tours run hourly on a first-come basis and include the upstairs of the big house; the self-guided audio tour takes about an hour and ten minutes. It is heavy, and it is worth it.

Near Laura, the town of Vacherie has small restaurants serving the plate-lunch food of the River Road: gumbo, fried seafood and po'boys. Pick one with cars outside and ask for the dish of the day. It is one of the few meals in the trip where you eat among the neighbors rather than other visitors.

Laura Plantation is a Creole plantation in Vacherie with a big house built in 1804-1805, four surviving slave cabins and a documented family history. Its guided tour is based on the family memoir of Laura Locoul Gore and on archival documents, and it visits the slave cabins, where Alcée Fortier is said to have collected the Creole tales of Compair Lapin, the Br'er Rabbit of West African origin, in the 1870s.

English tours leave daily at 10am, 11:20am, 12:20pm, 1:20pm and 2:20pm, and there is a museum exhibit on slavery on the grounds. The site is closed on New Year's Day, Mardi Gras Day, Easter Sunday, 4 July, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. It pairs well with Whitney: Whitney is told from the point of view of the enslaved, while Laura follows a Creole family and the enslaved people whose labor made its money.

Red beans and rice is the Monday dish of New Orleans (see Food). Mother's, on Poydras Street in the Central Business District, is the tourist-friendly place to eat it. It became a hangout for U.S. Marines during and after World War II, and the menu includes red beans and rice, jambalaya, crawfish étouffée and the Famous Ferdi Special.

It is not the secret neighborhood place, but the food is honest, and the site lists hours of 7am to 10pm every day. If a neighborhood restaurant is serving a Monday red beans special, take that instead. It is an hour's drive back from Laura.