The French Quarter has become too touristified for my taste. Filled with grimy bars, expensive antique shops, tacky trinket emporiums, and overpriced food the Vieux Carré isn’t always what it promises to be. Immediately downriver, however, is another neighborhood that is.
New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods and one of the best is the Fauberg Marigny. At the start of the 19th century, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (also famous for “inventing” the dice game craps) divided his plantation into residential lots, and the Fauberg Marigny was born. In the middle part of the twentieth, the neighborhood fell into decline, with the area around Jackson Square being called “Little Angola” – after the prison due to the extreme crime. In the eighties, however, commercialization in the French Quarter drove a lot of the residents downriver into Fauberg Marigny. The Marigny became what the Quarter used to be with Frenchmen street becoming ground zero for New Orlean’s essential live music scene.
The neighborhood is a good twelve inches above sea level and escaped the worst of Katrina’s ravages. There is a wide variety of classic New Orlean’s style architecture there – early Creole cottages and townhouses, American cottages, American townhouses, shotgun houses , 19th century corner store-houses, and various modern additions.
If I could live anywhere… I think I would live in Fauberg Marigny.
The Balcony Music Club isn't actually on Frenchmen Street. It's twenty feet down Decatur Street - but it's one of my favorites.
Standing outside the Balcony Music Club last Mardi Gras (I had stepped out for a second simply to catch my breath) a large group of German Tourists came down the crowded sidewalk. The man in the lead asked me in a thick accent, where to find, “Some real jazz music.” I lead them around the corner and pointed them up Frenchmen Street, telling them to stop by each club and pick the music they liked the best. He thanked me and said in very excited broken English, “Goot… Now Ve will get to see the Real New Orleans!”
Entrance to a jazz club on Frenchmen Street.
The Spotted Cat Jazz club on Frenchmen.
A row of shotgun houses in the Faubourg Marigny.
A mermaid stained glass window.
Bill Chance 
72 year old NO native here. Another (much more) interesting architectural detail on this house: the elaborately detailed metal trim along the eves is barge board. It’s very rare in this country; basically found only in my hometown.
The boards were reused from flat boats or barges that had brought goods down the Mississippi to the port. They weren’t worth the cost to transport back north, so they were dis-assembled, and the cheap boards were used to strengthen and trim homes.
Unadorned, you’ll find it around windows (as in your photo), doors, and along eves. Some homes have barge board clapboard siding and even interior walls. But the most coveted and beloved by locals has the intricate metal work trim you photographed.
It’s found on Creole cottages and shotgun houses from the 19th century, local style architecture heavily influenced by Caribbean folk style housing, down to their traditional vibrant paint colors. We’re the northernmost French/Spanish Caribbean town.
The river literally built the city.
Love your posts. Hope ya’ll come back to visit so I can ask the traditional question we ask each other after they’ve traveled or been dining out: “Wha-ja eat?”
Very interesting! I love the idea of the barges being disassembled and used in building the city at the end of the river.
I’m afraid I don’t get to New Orleans very much any more. My son that went to Tulane and later lived in the city (Working for Entergy) has now moved to Seattle. I feel the itch to visit the Crescent City all the time, Though.