Ursulines Street — Historic Corridor

The grid that became the French Quarter was drawn in 1718, when New Orleans was a French colonial city intended to control the Mississippi River Valley. Ursulines Street was part of that original grid. The street takes its name from the Ursuline nuns who arrived in 1727 and established the colony's first permanent institution — a convent the street leads directly to. The 1100 block holds the Beauregard-Keyes House, built in 1826. Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard lived there. So did novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes. The house sits on a street that runs from the river through the quieter residential blocks of the lower Quarter, carrying less tourist traffic than Royal or Bourbon. More of the 18th- and 19th-century architecture stays visible here. Walk Ursulines from Chartres Street toward Decatur for the best architectural sequence in the lower Quarter — a line of facades that trace the city back to when it was a French colonial outpost at the mouth of a continent's central river.