The Garden District is the grandest of New Orleans's neighbourhoods, developed in the nineteenth century by American merchants who deliberately built their mansions upriver from the Creole French Quarter — a geographical expression of the cultural divide between the old French-speaking city and the new American arrivals. The result is a neighbourhood of extraordinary antebellum mansions set in lush subtropical gardens, with live oaks draped in Spanish moss arching over the streets.
Magazine Street, which runs along the riverward edge of the district, is the city's best shopping and cafe strip — a long, walkable sequence of antique shops, vintage clothing stores, bookshops, and neighbourhood restaurants that serves the local population rather than tourists. The streetcar line runs along St Charles Avenue past the mansions; riding it is one of the simplest pleasures in New Orleans. Lafayette Cemetery, in the heart of the district, is another "City of the Dead" — older, less visited, and more overgrown than St. Louis No. 1, with a melancholy beauty.