Garden District Tour I Free Tours by Foot
The Garden District, or ‘Lafayette City’, as it was once known, is just a short streetcar ride from the French Quarter, but it feels like a world apart. Excluded from early 19th Century Creole society, newly arrived Yankees got to work creating their own city. The result is one of New Orleans’s most desired neighborhoods and one of the nation’s most beautifully preserved city districts and it’s home to the rich, the famous, the strange and the dead!
Join Free Tours by Foot as we stroll the leafy, magnolia shaded streets of the Garden District and a city of the dead, Lafayette Cemetery #1. This tour is not just mansions and manicured gardens, but stories of legends, tragedy, epidemics, lost causes, movie stars, celebrity chefs, and haunted spirits.
Sights we cover on the tour:
- Colonel Short’s Villa
- Briggs-Staub House
- Commander Restaurant
- Toby’s Corner
- Manning House
- Brevard-Mahat-Rice House
- Rosegate
- Payne-Strachan House
- Lafayette Cemetery*
- and much more…
*New Orleans is well know for there uneven streets, most famously in the Garden District. It is often a source of great humor and peril. Please wear flat shoes, keep your eyes pealed and we advise leaving the “To-Go Cup” at the hotel. Please contact us if anyone in your party uses walking assistance.
Tour information
Reservations: REQUIRED. Click here to reserve.
Where: Meets on the southwest corner of Prytania St. and Washington Ave. Look for your guide in orange with the Free Tours by Foot logo.
Duration: Approximately 2 hours. Approximately 1 mile in length.
When: 10:30am Tour: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (not offered on Tuesday) | 1:30pm Tour: Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
Cost: This tour is free to take, and you get to decide what, if anything, the tour was worth when it’s done. A name-your-own-price tour is a tour for anyone’s budget.