New Orleans French Quarter

Where it sits. The French Quarter, or Vieux Carre, is the original city of New Orleans: a rectangle of roughly thirteen blocks by seven on the natural levee of the Mississippi, bounded by Canal Street, Esplanade Avenue, North Rampart Street and the river. It is about half a square mile, walkable end to end in twenty-five minutes, and its ground is a few feet higher than the neighbourhoods behind it, which is why it stayed dry in 2005 when much of the city did not. The street grid runs at an angle to the compass because it follows the river's crescent, so New Orleanians navigate by riverside, lakeside, uptown and downtown rather than by north and south.

The story behind it. The engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the grid in 1721, three years after Bienville founded the settlement, around a parade ground facing the river called the Place d'Armes. Almost nothing French survives above ground. Two catastrophic fires — one on Good Friday in March 1788 that took more than 800 buildings, another in December 1794 — destroyed the colonial town during the period of Spanish rule, and the rebuilding was done to Spanish codes requiring brick or brick-between-post construction, tiled roofs, firewalls and interior courtyards. That is why the Quarter's oldest fabric reads Spanish Caribbean rather than French provincial. The lacy cast-iron galleries that define the district in photographs are later still: mostly American work of the 1840s and 1850s, mass-produced in foundries and bolted onto older buildings. The Place d'Armes was renamed Jackson Square in 1851 and given Clark Mills's equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in 1856. Around it stand the St. Louis Cathedral, whose present church dates from 1789-94 and was substantially remodelled in 1850; the Cabildo of 1795-99, where the Louisiana Purchase transfers were signed in 1803; the matching Presbytere; and the two Pontalba Buildings of 1849-51, among the oldest apartment blocks in the country. In 1936-37 Louisiana created the Vieux Carre Commission, one of the earliest historic-district protection bodies in the United States, which is the reason the Quarter was not demolished for a riverfront expressway in the 1960s.

On screen. Few American neighbourhoods have been filmed more, and few are more often faked.

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is set in the Quarter and on Elysian Fields Avenue just beyond it, but Elia Kazan shot almost all of it on Warner Bros. sound stages in Burbank, with only limited New Orleans exteriors
• Easy Rider (1969) filmed its Mardi Gras sequence in the Quarter and its acid trip among the tombs of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, just across Rampart Street
• JFK (1991) used the district heavily, with the 1910 Louisiana Supreme Court building at 400 Royal Street standing in for period offices
• Interview with the Vampire (1994) dressed Royal Street back to the 1790s, laying dirt over the asphalt and hanging oil lanterns
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), American Horror Story: Coven (2013), The Originals and NCIS: New Orleans have all made the Quarter and Jackson Square a recurring backdrop

What you actually see today. Royal Street is antiques dealers, galleries and balconied townhouses, and closes to traffic for street musicians in the middle of the day. Bourbon Street, one block over, is the loud commercial strip and represents a small fraction of the district. Chartres and Dumaine hold the quieter residential blocks. Fixed points include Cafe du Monde in the French Market, pouring chicory coffee and frying beignets since 1862; Preservation Hall at 726 St. Peter Street, running acoustic traditional-jazz sets in a bare room since 1961; Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon, a brick-between-post cottage of about 1772 and one of the oldest structures in the city; and the Napoleon House on Chartres. The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana State Museum sites on Jackson Square carry the serious historical material.

Getting there and timing. The Quarter is a short walk or streetcar ride from the Central Business District, and the Riverfront and Canal streetcar lines skirt it. Driving in is a mistake; parking is scarce and expensive. Carnival season peaks in February and books out the whole city, Jazz Fest fills late April and early May, and both bring crowds and premium room rates. Late autumn is the reliable sweet spot for weather. Streets are flat but the pavements are narrow, buckled by tree roots and interrupted by high kerbs, and many historic buildings have stepped entrances, so wheelchair travel needs planning.