Magazine Street
Six-mile shopping corridor of narrow wood-frame shotgun houses and creole cottages turned boutiques.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Magazine Street in New Orleans starts by naming what these six miles of narrow wood-frame buildings really were: not boutique retail, but the cheapest legal house the city could put over a family's head. It traces the street back to a 1788 fire that led building codes to force skinny wooden lots onto residents who could not afford brick, and follows the shotgun house form itself, carried by free people of color fleeing revolution in Haiti from a design rooted in West Africa. Walk one of these floor plans and you will notice the doors rarely actually line up, whatever the old legend claims.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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