New Orleans's Most Iconic Landmarks

The Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, presides over Jackson Square as the spiritual heart of the French Quarter and the oldest continuously operating Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States.

A church has stood on this spot since 1727, but the present building was completed in 1794 after fire destroyed its predecessor, and it was substantially rebuilt and enlarged in 1850 to the design of architect J.N.B.

de Pouilly, who gave it the three tapering spires that now define the skyline of the old city.

Dedicated to King Louis IX of France, the cathedral blends French and Spanish colonial sensibilities with later Gothic Revival touches.

Inside, the barrel-vaulted nave draws the eye toward a painted ceiling and a mural of Saint Louis announcing the Seventh Crusade above the main altar, while stained glass and quiet side chapels reward a slow look.

It remains a working parish church, so services, weddings, and funerals fill it throughout the week alongside a steady current of visitors.

The cathedral anchors a remarkable ensemble: the Cabildo and the Presbytere flank it, the Pontalba row houses line the square, and the pedestrian plaza out front hums with brass bands, tarot readers, and portrait artists. Behind the church, tiny St.

Anthony's Garden and the shadowy Pere Antoine Alley complete one of the most atmospheric corners in New Orleans.

The Cabildo flanks St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, built between 1795 and 1799 to house the Spanish colonial governing council, the Illustrious Cabildo, from which it takes its name.

Its arcaded facade and wrought-iron balcony are a fine example of the Spanish period that reshaped the Quarter after the great fires of the late eighteenth century, and a French-style mansard roof was added later, giving the building its distinctive layered profile.

Its greatest claim to history unfolded in 1803, when the formal transfer ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase took place in its second-floor rooms, moving the vast territory from France to the United States and doubling the size of the young nation.

That moment alone makes the Cabildo one of the most historically significant buildings in the American South.

Today it forms the flagship of the Louisiana State Museum, its galleries tracing the sweep of the region's story from Native peoples and colonial rule through slavery, the Battle of New Orleans, Reconstruction, and the layered cultures that made the city.

Among its treasures is one of the few surviving death masks of Napoleon Bonaparte. The rooms themselves, with their views over the square, are part of the experience.

Cafe du Monde is less a restaurant than an institution, a coffee stand established in the French Market in 1862 that has grown into the single most beloved culinary landmark in New Orleans.

Its menu has barely changed in more than a century and a half: square French-style beignets buried under a snowdrift of powdered sugar, and cafe au lait made with dark-roasted coffee blended with chicory, a wartime economy that became a defining local taste.

The original stand sits at the downriver end of Jackson Square beneath its familiar green-and-white striped awning, open twenty-four hours a day and closing only on Christmas and when a hurricane forces the issue.

Waiters in paper hats shuttle between crowded marble-topped tables, and the constant clatter, the powdered sugar drifting across every surface, and the mix of tourists and locals at dawn make the scene as memorable as the food.

Beignets themselves are a legacy of the French colonists, fried dough with roots reaching back to old-world fritters, and here they arrive three to an order, hot and pillowy.

Pairing them with the bittersweet chicory coffee is a rite of passage that visitors and returning New Orleanians repeat again and again, a small, sweet, powdered-sugar-dusted ceremony that defines a morning in the Quarter.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, opened in 1789 just beyond the edge of the original French Quarter, is the oldest surviving cemetery in New Orleans and the most famous of the city's celebrated cities of the dead.

Because the water table sits so high in this delta landscape, burials here rise above the ground in tombs and family vaults, creating narrow lanes of whitewashed masonry that resemble miniature streets and houses.

Within a single compact block lie generations of the city's Creole, French, Spanish, and free people of color, their tombs reused across families over centuries in a distinctive local practice.

The cemetery's most visited spot is the reputed tomb of Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century Voodoo priestess whose grave still draws offerings and requests, and a stark white pyramid tomb built as the future resting place of actor Nicolas Cage adds a modern note of curiosity.

The cemetery is a place of genuine beauty and melancholy, its plastered surfaces glowing in the sun and its ironwork and inscriptions telling of epidemics, feuds, and the layered cultures that built the city.

It also demands respect, both as an active burial ground and as a fragile historic site that has suffered vandalism, which is why access is now carefully controlled.

Preservation Hall is a small, deliberately unadorned music room on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter, founded in 1961 to protect and nurture the traditional New Orleans jazz that gave the world one of its great art forms.

At a time when the music risked fading, the hall gave older Black musicians who had shaped early jazz a dignified place to perform nightly, and it has continued that mission without interruption ever since.

The experience is intentionally stripped down. There is no bar, no food, no microphones, and no air conditioning; audiences sit on worn cushions and wooden benches or stand at the back in a dim room hung with faded paintings and instruments, close enough to feel the horns.

That intimacy is the point, putting listeners face to face with acoustic music played by masters in a space that has barely changed in decades.

The resident Preservation Hall Jazz Band has toured the world and collaborated across genres, but the beating heart of the institution remains these nightly sets in the original room.

Hearing a clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo, and upright bass fill the small hall, with the band taking requests and trading choruses, is to hear New Orleans jazz in as pure a setting as still exists anywhere.

The French Market runs along the downriver edge of the French Quarter, tracing its origins to 1791 and claiming the title of the oldest public market in the United States.

The site was a trading place long before, used by Native peoples beside the river, and it grew under French and Spanish rule into the commercial belly of the colonial city, where farmers, fishers, and merchants brought their goods to the levee.

The covered market sheds that survive today, rebuilt and expanded over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, once brimmed with butchers, vegetable sellers, and vendors of every kind.

Now the arcades house a lively mix of a farmers and flea market, craft and souvenir stalls, spice and hot-sauce sellers, and food stands serving local specialties from muffulettas to alligator sausage and pralines, stretching several blocks from Cafe du Monde toward the neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny.

Beyond the shopping, the French Market is a place to feel the everyday rhythm of the city where it meets the Mississippi.

Musicians play in its plazas, festivals fill its open spaces, and the adjoining stretch of Decatur and North Peters Streets, with the Old US Mint at its far end, ties the market into a full riverside walk that has been the crossroads of New Orleans commerce and culture for well over two hundred years.