French Quarter
Historic riverside neighborhood of lacy cast-iron balconies, colonial architecture, and centuries-old street life.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Pontalba Buildings
Parisian-style row houses with cast-iron balconies, among the oldest continuously rented apartments in the country.
Jackson Square
Landscaped public square framed by matching red-brick row houses with the city's first cast-iron balconies.
Garden District
Antebellum garden neighborhood of columned mansions behind cast-iron fences cast from nineteenth-century foundry molds.
Bourbon Street
Legendary French Quarter thoroughfare of bars, jazz clubs and balconies lit for after dark.
Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar
Candlelit eighteenth-century cottage bar where strangers gather round an old piano to sing along.
LaLaurie Mansion
Ornate French Quarter mansion whose fire exposed a hidden torture chamber and drove an owner abroad.