Garden District New Orleans, Louisiana

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The Garden District is composed of examples of architecture ranging from the finest examples of 19th Century Greek Revival, to Georgian, to "Southern Colonial", to French chateau and provincial styles, and even to a Swiss chalet. There is Gothic, and there is early and late Victorian, even Steamboat Gothic. Of course, there is contemporary, but even this harbors some semblance of an attempt to harmonize with the surroundings.

The streets are tree-shaded. Many of the earliest gutters, lined with slate slabs from Pennsylvania, remain. A number of early 1830's and 40's small houses remain, testifying to the varying incomes of the early dwellers in the Garden District. All was not affluence.

Many of the small homes are untouched, giving fine representation to the wide range of architectural modes of the original Garden District, such, as: the "shot-gun" and "camel-back" designs, indigenous to New Orleans and environs The gardens are still profuse, although not as large as they were when the district received its name, as the estates are largely contracted. However, the same semi-tropical climate prevails in which the foliage and flowers grow so abundantly and in many varieties.

There is a quaintness, a stillness, a prevailing quiet and gentility of the original Garden District which sets it apart, not only from the other sections of the Crescent City, but from anything like it in America. A recent visitor, an editor of England's Country Life, said there was nothing like it anywhere, even in England or France.