#NEW ORLEANS TOURIST ATTRACTIONS FREE#

Planning Tip: If you’re going to be on St Charles Avenue, hop on the St Charles Avenue streetcar, which ferries passengers on its iconic green rail cars throughout the day. If you want to see similar homes on a less-trafficked throughway, try parallel Prytania Street. Whatever else you may think of these giant homes, they are beautiful, and on a pleasant afternoon or evening, strolling past them is a dreamy prospect. St Charles Avenue is blessed with shade from enormous live oaks, which grow through sidewalks that run by some of the largest mansions in the city. The city’s most beautiful avenue follows the curve of the Mississippi, running through neighborhoods like Uptown and the Garden District. People here value eating and put great stock into, well, stock – and whatever else goes into the gumbo pot. And yet, the food culture here remains kind of old-school.

Waves of immigrants have brought their own dishes, and even the city’s grande dame old-line restaurants increasingly incorporate international influences. Maybe that’s why this city so dominates lists like the James Beard awards, despite its relatively diminutive size.īut New Orleans food isn’t the only food you can find here. Chefs here realized they were in a different place, and adapted the ingredients of Louisiana’s seas and swamps and woods into one of North America’s great hyper-regional cuisines. This city has been doing locavore and slow eating and seasonal menus for (literal) centuries before those words became the buzzy marketing nomenclature attached to restaurants all over the US. The sensory pleasure most people immediately think of when they hear “New Orleans” is food. New Orleans is renowned for its food like gumbo © LauriPatterson/Getty Images 3. On Mardi Gras day, the biggest walking parade is the Society of St Anne procession, which can be caught around 9am anywhere around Burgundy and Louisa Streets in the Bywater. The caveat is: you need to wear a costume, and you need to know where the walking parades are. Smaller walking parades are another big part of the Mardi Gras experience, and anyone who wants to join one is usually can. Planning tip: During Mardi Gras, it’s easy to watch parades if you join the crowds along St Charles Avenue who throng the floats for trinkets (“throws”) tossed to the masses. It’s worth noting that there is no one way to Mardi Gras – the holiday has as many ways of being enjoyed as there are New Orleanians – and Fat Tuesday itself is the culmination of roughly two and a half weeks of gradually intensifying partying otherwise known as Carnival season.

This is a party where the city’s penchant for hedonism is cranked up to the highest possible setting, then unleashed on her citizens in a riot of intensely creative costuming and joyful parades. It may be celebrated in other cities, but there is no Mardi Gras like New Orleans Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans is loud, proud and colorful ©GTS Productions/Shutterstock 2. To find it, WWOZ’s Livewire puts together an exhaustive list of local live gigs which is painstakingly updated daily. Planning tip: There’s a lot of music on tap in New Orleans. The Saturn Bar is the place to go for an R&B dance party. On St Claude Avenue, you might catch a DJ spinning bounce music – The Big Easy’s native twerking dance genre – or burlesque at the Hi Ho Lounge. These include the Spotted Cat and d.b.a., where shows kick off regularly, usually around 6pm and 9pm.Īnd jazz isn’t the only game in town. There are several clubs here, each within a few city blocks of one another. This was the music of New Orleans' seedy underbelly, and while the music has evolved, the city has never lost touch with its muddy roots.Īlthough New Orleans is getting more expensive, working musicians still live by their gigs here, and the most accessible way to see them is on Frenchmen Street, in Faubourg Marigny. Jazz is often thought of as prestige music, but it largely grew out of Storyville, the city's infamous Red Light District, which was destroyed in 1917.

#NEW ORLEANS TOURIST ATTRACTIONS FREE#

The granddaddy of modern pop music was a synthesis of African rhythms kept alive by slaves and free people of color, European harmonies, and brass instruments introduced by marching bands. New Orleans produces a plethora of art, but none of the creative output has left such a palpable imprint on the world as music. You can't move for live music in the New Orleans French Quarter ©GTS Productions/Shutterstock 1.

New orleans tourist attractions