What is bourbon street

Book Your Stay! Adults: 1 2 3 4 Rooms: 1 2 3 4. During Mardi Gras, however, the street is closed to vehicles for five days. Site Info. We serve cookies to analyze traffic and customize content on this site. It boggles the mind. Thank goodness they rebuilt, or today there would be no cheap T-shirt shops selling hot sauce and Mardi Gras masks to mark your visit to NOLA.

In , the impressively named Charles Boudousquie managed to finagle over a hundred thousand dollars to open the French Opera House on Bourbon and Toulouse Streets, which he touted to best even the most venerated opera houses of Paris. A cold one for less than three bucks? This is New Orleans ingenuity at its finest. You can still catch the excellent Latin night at her namesake club weekly on Bourbon St. John, The Meters, and so many more.

Skip to main content New Orleans Lifestyle. It was once the most populated street in the city. That particular iteration of brown liquor had not even been invented when the street was laid out in by Adrian de Pauger. The street, then located in the colony of New France, was named for the French royal House of Bourbon which bourbon, the drink, was ultimately named for.

For most of its history, Bourbon was a modest residential street, populated by a mix of Creoles New Orleanians of Franco-Spanish descent and the successive waves of immigrants who have settled the French Quarter. Bourbon began morphing into an entertainment strip in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Red Light District of Storyville was established a few blocks away on Basin Street.

Bleed-over from the Red Light District begot a shift in the Quarter, which became less residential and more entertainment-oriented. In the Quarter, the entertainment focus shifted to live music, gambling, burlesque shows, and drinking establishments, dozens of which opened on Bourbon. By the post-World War II period, Bourbon Street was similar in character, if not appearance, to the Bourbon Street of today, although live music was more heavily emphasized back in the day.

The Meters played here, as did Dr. John and Louis Prima, among dozens of other acts that have defined successive generations of American music. While there are still live music clubs on Bourbon, those venues have tended to spread into other parts of the city. Upper Bourbon is the area best known to visitors — the land of lots of neon, roaming bachelor and bachelorette parties, strip clubs, and enormous drinks served in souvenir cups.

Here are some of our favorite hangouts on Bourbon Street, running from Canal to Esplanade. We basically always have time for barbeque shrimp, which is not grilled or smoked, but rather cooked in a lemon butter and pepper sauce. Plenty of gumbo and Cajun pasta dishes round out the menu — that latter category includes some delicious fare like crawfish tails served over fettuccini alfredo and a shrimp and alligator jambalaya, also tossed with fettuccini.

The cuisine is old-school, heavy Creole classics — chicken clemenceau and crabmeat sardou — but folks come for the scene as much as the food.