French Quarter
Historic riverside neighborhood of lacy cast-iron balconies, colonial architecture, and centuries-old street life.
This guide to the French Quarter in New Orleans follows the ironwork overhead back to a single Bourbon Street forge, opened in 1832 by a French immigrant named Jean Antoine Mangin. Three generations of his family hammered out the balconies and gates you see around you, but the guide reaches further back too, to the enslaved and free Black blacksmiths who were doing this same skilled work long before the Mangins arrived, some working coded African and Haitian symbols into the metal. You will hear how a trade prized as aristocratic among the enslaved still nearly vanished within one family's lifetime.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.