Garden District
New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Garden District. Famous for its nineteenth century homes and gardens. This area was originally part of Livaudais Plantation. Became part of City of Lafayette, 1833. Annexed by City of New Orleans, 1852. Designated a National Historic Landmark, 1974.
Erected by Garden District Association
The Story
The Garden District grew out of the old Livaudais Plantation, subdivided as Americans poured into New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase and built the wealthy suburb of the City of Lafayette in the 1830s. Absorbed into New Orleans in 1852, its blocks of columned mansions and lush gardens became one of the best-preserved collections of nineteenth-century domestic architecture in the South. In 1974 the whole neighborhood was named a National Historic Landmark.
Why it matters
It captures the antebellum prosperity of the Deep South's greatest port and the American migration that reshaped a once-French and Spanish city.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- ยท Annexation of Lafayette by New Orleans, 1852
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Hedgewood
New Orleans, LA
The Hedgewood is an imposing Colonial Revival house built in 1894 for cotton broker Charles Miltenberger by Chicago builder Thomas Nicholson, who also raised Tulane's Gibson Hall and the St. Charles Hotel that same year. Enlarged in 1907, it later spent thirty-three years as a hotel before its more recent reinvention.
Goldsmith-Godchaux House
New Orleans, LA
Designed in 1859 by the noted architect Henry Howard, the Goldsmith-Godchaux House is a jewel of antebellum New Orleans residential design. It is prized for its painted interiors, said to hold more fresco and stencil decoration than nearly any other mid-nineteenth-century home in the South. The state tourism department erected the marker in 1980.
Louis Bouligny
New Orleans, LA
This was the site of the plantation of Louis Bouligny (1781โ1862), remembered as soldier, planter, and statesman. In 1834 the land was laid out as Faubourg Bouligny, a New Orleans suburb bounded by Upperline, General Taylor, Clara, and the river.
Julia Row
New Orleans, LA
Julia Row is a terrace of thirteen identical townhouses erected in 1832โ33 for the New Orleans Building Company, designed by architect James H. Dakin. The second house from St. Charles Avenue was the childhood home of Henry Hobson Richardson, who grew up to become the Boston architect famous for the Richardsonian Romanesque style; in 1976 the Preservation Resource Center restored 604 Julia Street.