New Orleans

By 1910 the French Quarter was more Italian than French. Sicilian immigrants had arrived in huge numbers in the 1880s and 90s, and they ran the grocery stores and fruit stalls and family restaurants on streets that still carry French names. Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian cobbler, opened shop on Royal Street around 1880 and bought a hotel at Royal and Iberville in 1886 that the family expanded through 1928 — one of the few American family-owned hotels to survive the Depression. In 1906, Salvatore Lupo watched Italian dock workers juggling their lunch and stacked it all on a round sesame loaf at Central Grocery, 923 Decatur. The muffuletta was born. Not every chapter is on a plaque. In 1891 a New Orleans mob lynched eleven Italian men — one of the largest mass lynchings in American history; no marker explains what happened. The food is where the story holds.

The men who dug the New Basin Canal between 1832 and 1838 came from Ireland because the Famine left them nothing to stay for. They worked by hand, three miles of swamp, a dollar a day. Yellow fever and cholera took the camps — the death toll was never officially recorded; estimates ran from 8,000 to 30,000. The ones who survived built houses on the river side of Magazine Street and made the Irish Channel. In 1840 they raised St. Patrick's Church in the American Sector — an 85-foot vaulted ceiling, stained glass shipped from Europe, a cathedral-scale rebuke to anyone who'd written them off. In 1896, Kingsley House opened on Constance Street as the South's first settlement house, modeled on Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago. It's still on Constance Street, still doing the work, 130 years on. The Channel changed; the bones stayed.

Versailles, in New Orleans East, is home to the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam's own diaspora hubs — families who arrived as refugees in 1975 and built their own Catholic parish, market, and commercial strip on the edge of swamp. The Saturday morning market on Alcee Fortier runs before dawn, with vendors speaking Vietnamese, selling herbs, live crawfish, and bun bo Hue. It's the least-visited and most-alive immigrant neighborhood in the city.

The Tremé Market on Orleans Avenue has been the commercial heart of the neighborhood since 1812, making it one of the oldest African American market traditions in America. Enslaved and free people of color sold produce, meat, and prepared food here generations before emancipation. The current building dates to later rebuilds, but the site, the vendors, and the function have been continuous. It's where Creole cooking bought its ingredients.

This state-designated scenic byway follows Bayou Terre-aux-Bœufs — an abandoned channel of the Mississippi River — through the heart of the Isleño settlements. The route passes historic homes, fishing villages, and plantation sites dating to the 1700s. The bayou's French name means 'Land of the Buffalo,' a reminder that bison once roamed the marshes before European contact.

The home base of the most powerful political boss in Louisiana outside New Orleans. Leander Perez controlled Plaquemines Parish for decades through a combination of oil revenue, patronage, and racial terror. He swung the parish to the Dixiecrats in 1948 and kept it anti-Democratic at the presidential level for the rest of the century. When the Catholic Church ordered school integration, Perez fought it so viciously that Archbishop Rummel excommunicated him in 1962 — one of the most dramatic acts by the American Catholic Church in the civil rights era. The NRHP-listed mansion in Braithwaite is privately held. Viewable from the road.

The workers' neighborhood that grew up around the Domino Sugar refinery and the Ford Motor Company assembly plant — both of which operated in Arabi, just across the parish line from the Lower Ninth Ward. The NRHP-listed district preserves the shotgun houses and corner stores of an early 20th-century industrial community. The Ford plant is also individually listed on the National Register.

What the rest of the country calls a median, New Orleans calls the neutral ground — a name that dates to the strip of Canal Street that separated the French-speaking Creole downtown from the English-speaking American uptown, territory neither side claimed. The term stuck. Now every median is a neutral ground, and the linguistic fossil points to a century of civic tension. St. Charles' neutral ground is where you watch parades.

Kingsley House opened in 1896 on Constance Street in the Irish Channel — the first settlement house in the South, modeled on Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago. Its founders offered immigrant families English lessons, health clinics, and kindergarten in a neighborhood the city otherwise ignored. The institution is still operating, still at the same address, still doing the same work 130 years later. Few nonprofits in America have a longer continuous run.

Kate Chopin spent the 1870s and 80s living on Magazine Street with her Creole husband, watching a city that would give her the material for The Awakening — the 1899 novel that ended her career and later became one of the founding texts of American feminist literature. Chopin walked these streets pregnant with six children in twelve years. Edna Pontellier, her protagonist, walks them too. The houses Chopin lived in are gone, but the avenue remembers.

One of the earliest European sites in Louisiana. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville built this fort in 1700 — called 'Mississippi Fort' — to anchor France's claim on the river. By 1707, Native Americans had forced the French to abandon it. No physical trace remains above ground; only a historical marker on a low ridge surrounded by swamp identifies the spot where France's Mississippi ambition began and failed. A National Historic Landmark for the story, not the structure.

On March 3, 1699, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his party camped on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from what would become Fort Jackson. It was Mardi Gras day. Iberville named the spot 'Bayou Mardi Gras' — the first recorded celebration of Carnival in Louisiana, a quarter century before New Orleans existed. A plaque at Fort Jackson commemorates the site. New Orleans didn't invent Mardi Gras. Plaquemines Parish did.

When Admiral David Farragut’s fleet ran the gauntlet past the forts south of the city in April 1862, New Orleans fell without a ground battle. Confederate General Mansfield Lovell retreated from City Hall through the CBD to the train station, evacuating what troops he could before Union forces occupied the city. The route from Lafayette Square to the old Canal Street depot traces the Confederate withdrawal — the moment the richest city in the Confederacy changed hands and the course of the western war shifted permanently.

The word 'Dixie' — the nickname for the American South — may have originated at the Citizens State Bank on Royal Street, which printed ten-dollar notes with 'DIX' (French for ten) on the reverse. Riverboat men heading to New Orleans talked about going to 'the land of Dixies,' which became 'Dixieland,' which became 'Dixie.' The theory is disputed but widely cited, and Daniel Decatur Emmett's 1859 minstrel song cemented the word in American vocabulary. The bank building is gone; the name it may have given the South is not.

Nobody knows for certain where 'The Big Easy' came from. The most credible theory traces it to jazz musicians in the early 1900s who used the phrase to describe New Orleans as an easy city to find work — compared to New York's 'Big Apple,' where competition was fierce. The nickname didn't become widely known until Betty Guillaud's newspaper column in the 1970s and the 1987 Dennis Quaid film. Locals rarely use the phrase themselves. It's a visitor's name for a city that has never been easy at all.

The last suburb before Plaquemines becomes something else entirely. Belle Chasse is home to Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans — the largest military installation in the metro area — and the starting point for the 70-mile drive down LA-23 to the end of the road at Venice. The new Belle Chasse Bridge (2024) replaced the century-old tunnel that had been the only vehicle crossing of the Intracoastal Waterway into lower Plaquemines. This is where the Seafood & Heritage Festival happens every April.

Abraham Lincoln made two flatboat trips down the Mississippi to New Orleans — the first in 1828 at age 19, the second in 1831. Both trips brought him to the city’s slave markets, where he witnessed the auction of human beings for the first time. Lincoln never wrote a detailed account of what he saw, but his law partner William Herndon later claimed that Lincoln said: ‘If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.’ The New Orleans waterfront where Lincoln landed is now part of the Riverwalk — nothing marks the site.

On January 8, 1811, between 200 and 500 enslaved people on the German Coast sugar plantations west of New Orleans organized the largest slave revolt in American history. They marched toward the city along River Road, burning plantations and killing two white men. The militia caught them within two days. At least 40 were executed; their severed heads were mounted on poles along the river from the German Coast to New Orleans as a warning. The revolt was suppressed so brutally and so thoroughly that it was largely erased from public memory until the 21st century.

In 1853, when the Jefferson & Pontchartrain Railroad drove a 2,170-foot wooden pier into Lake Pontchartrain, a cluster of stilt houses grew around it. Bucktown — named, depending on who you ask, for the deer hunted in the surrounding marsh or the young bucks who came out on weekends — became a fishing village that supplied New Orleans with crabs, shrimp, and lake fish for over a century. Hurricanes leveled it in 1915 and again in 1947. Katrina nearly finished the job. But Bucktown kept rebuilding. The families here built their own boats, wove their own nets, trapped crabs year-round, and ran the seafood processing plants that fed the restaurants on the lakefront — Deanie's since 1961, R&O's since 1980. Every other lakeside fishing settlement in metro New Orleans was demolished for flood protection or development. Bucktown survived because the people who lived there refused to leave. Today the harbor still holds a working fleet, the marsh boardwalk extends into the wetlands, and the smell of boiling crawfish drifts across the levee on spring evenings.

Within a decade of Etienne de Boré's 1795 breakthrough in granulating sugar, seventy plantations lined the Mississippi from present-day Kenner to English Turn. The Kenner family acquired Oakland, Belle Grove, and Pasture Plantations in the 1840s, eventually owning nearly everything that would become the modern city. Sugar ruled until suburbanization swallowed the fields. Then the airport arrived, and Kenner became the first thing most visitors see when they land in Louisiana. On July 9, 1982, it also became the site of one of the worst aviation disasters in American history. Pan Am Flight 759, a Boeing 727, crashed seconds after takeoff, killing all 145 people aboard and 8 on the ground. The wreckage destroyed six homes in a residential neighborhood less than 5,000 feet from the runway. The tragedy led directly to the development of airborne windshear detection systems, which the FAA mandated on all commercial aircraft by 1993. Kenner absorbed the loss and kept growing around the airport. The Rivertown Historic District, sixteen blocks along the river, preserves what came before — including the spot where LaSalle's expedition camped and where, in 1870, Gypsy Jem Mace and Tom Allen fought what is recognized as the first world heavyweight championship prizefight.

The word métairie is French for a sharecropping farm, and that's all this was for most of its history — flat, soggy land along an old bayou ridge, too wet for much besides small-scale agriculture. What changed everything was drainage. When engineers figured out how to pump the swamp out faster than it seeped back in, Metairie exploded. The post-WWII suburban boom turned it into one of the most densely populated unincorporated areas in the South. Veterans Memorial Boulevard became four miles of strip malls and parking lots. Then came Fat City. In the 1970s, an apartment boom near Severn and 17th Street drew young renters, and within a few years there were fifty bars and lounges packed into a few blocks — the Playboy Club, Bobby McGee's, Don Quixote. By the early 1980s, drugs and strip clubs had moved in. The parish council rezoned it in 1985, and the party was over. Through all of this, Metairie Cemetery has sat on the old ridge, quiet and unmoved. It was a horse racing track before it was a cemetery — founded in 1838, converted in 1872. The oval layout of the graves still follows the shape of the original racetrack. It is the most honest monument in Metairie: everything here was something else first.

They came for gold mines that didn't exist. In 1721, roughly 4,000 German-speaking immigrants — from the Rhineland, Bavaria, Alsace-Lorraine, and Swiss cantons — sailed for Louisiana after John Law's Company of the West promised land filled with silver and copper. What they found was swamp. By January 1722, the survivors had been deposited on the west bank of the Mississippi, twenty-five miles above New Orleans, in three settlements they named Hoffen, Marienthal, and Augsburg. Under the leadership of Charles Frédérique d'Arensbourg, who would guide the community for fifty-five years, they did something no other colonial group in Louisiana managed: they fed the colony. By 1724, the Germans were the primary food suppliers to New Orleans, paddling pirogues loaded with vegetables and grain downriver to the city markets. The stretch of river they farmed became known as the Côte des Allemands — the German Coast. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, observers called it the best-cultivated land in the territory. The descendants spread south into what became Gretna, Harvey, and Westwego. The German names faded, absorbed into Creole culture, but the West Bank towns they built still carry the grid patterns and church-centered layouts of Rhineland villages.

In 1993, Drago Cvitanovich put an oyster in its shell on an open flame, hit it with garlic butter and Parmesan, and accidentally invented the dish that would become the most imitated plate on the Gulf Coast. He did it in Metairie, not New Orleans. That detail matters. Jefferson Parish has been quietly building one of the great American restaurant corridors for decades, and it started long before charbroiled oysters. Mosca's opened in 1946 on a dark stretch of Highway 90 near Westwego — an Italian roadhouse so far from anything that first-time visitors think they're lost. Provino Mosca, an Italian immigrant, cooked in a building owned by crime boss Carlos Marcello. Eighty years later, the family still runs it, the exterior still looks rough, and the Oysters Mosca still arrive in cast iron. Deanie's has been shucking in Bucktown since 1961, R&O's has served roast beef po'boys against the levee since 1980, and the Westwego Shrimp Lot still sells that morning's catch off the boats. The supply chain is short here — boat to dock to kitchen, sometimes in the same parish, sometimes in the same morning. New Orleans gets the fame. Jefferson Parish feeds the habit.

The 'French Quarter' is mostly Spanish. Two devastating fires — 1788 and 1794 — burned the original French wooden buildings. Spain rebuilt the Quarter in brick and stucco with interior courtyards, iron balconies, and arcaded ground floors. The signature look tourists photograph today is Spanish colonial, not French.