Neighborhoods

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New Orleans is home to many different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, undoubtedly due in part to its unique history and to the present fact that it is both a metropolis and an international port. But this cultural diversity is nowhere more recognized than in the city's remarkable collection of historic neighborhoods, many of which are so distinctive that it's hard to believe you're in the same town (or even country for that matter).

Native Orleanians grew up in separate sections, or faubourgs (French for suburbs). These neighborhoods were, in effect, individual hamlets. Since 90% of the area originally was swamp or water, they were scattered sites, built where "ridges" or natural levees offered elevation above the recurrent floods. Most of New Orleans is reclaimed swamp, lacking solid land. And prior to the 20th Century, its principal forms of transportation were 110 miles of canals and 200 miles of streetcar lines.

Until 1890, the area was still a collection of disconnected suburbs - neighborhoods without neighbors. In many cases such neighborhoods were divided by language. The original French Creoles spoke French and disdained the "Americans" who arrived 90 years later. The Germans, Irish, Italians, and West Indians also added to the extraordinary " babble" of about a dozen languages and scores of different dialects slicing the air in the city's marketplaces."  

Perhaps Charles Dudley Warner, writing in Harper's Magazine 1889, said it best when he concluded: "New Orleans is either the most cosmopolitan of all provincial cities... or the most provincial of all cosmopolitan cities."  Either way, the amalgamation of the different neighborhoods that make up New Orleans is a great part of what makes this place so magnificent. So, to learn more about some of the Crescent City's most distinctive communities, click on one of our detailed links below. 

Garden District 

French Quarter 

Uptown / University 

Faubourg Marigny

City Park / St. John 

Faubourg Treme 

Mid-City

 

 

Mel Leavitt, dean of New Orleans' television new commentators and leading author-historian, contributed to this article with the assistance of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau Public Affairs Department.