The French Quarter, also known as Vieux Carré, is the oldest and most famous neighborhood in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. When La Nouvelle Orléans ("New Orleans" in French) was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the city was originally centered on the French Quarter, or the Vieux Carré ("Old Square" in French) as it was known then. While the area is still referred to as the Vieux Carré by some, it is more commonly known as the French Quarter today, or simply "The Quarter."[1] The district as a whole is a National Historic Landmark, and it contains numerous individual historic buildings. It was relatively lightly affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as compared to other areas of the city and the region as a whole. The Quarter is subdistrict of the French Quarter/CBD Area.
Most of the French Quarter's architecture was built during the Spanish rule over New Orleans. The Great New Orleans Fire (1788) and another great fire in 1794 destroyed most of the Quarter's old French colonial architecture, leaving the colony's new Spanish overlords to rebuild it according to more modern tastes—and strict new fire codes, which mandated that all structures be physically adjacent and close to the curb to create a firewall. The old French peaked roofs were replaced with flat tiled ones, and now-banned wooden siding with fire-resistant stucco, painted in the pastel hues fashionable at the time. As a result, colorful walls and roofs and elaborately decorated ironwork balconies and galleries from both the 18th century and 19th centuries abound. (In southeast Louisiana, a distinction is made between "balconies", which are self supporting and attached to the side of the building, and "galleries" which are supported from the ground by poles or columns.)
Long after the U.S. purchase of Louisiana, Francophone creole descendants of French and Spanish colonists lived in this part of town, and the French language was often heard there as late as the start of the 1920s.
When Anglophone Americans began to move in after the Louisiana Purchase, they mostly built just upriver, across modern day Canal Street. Canal Street became the meeting place of two cultures, one francophone creole and the other anglophone American. (Local landowners had retained architect and surveyor Barthelemy Lafon to subdivide their property to create an American suburb). The median of the wide boulevard became a place where the two contentious cultures could meet and bilingually do business. As such, it became known as the "neutral ground", and this name persists in the New Orleans area for medians.
In the late 19th century the Quarter became a less fashionable part of town, and many immigrants from southern Italy and Ireland settled in the section. In the early 20th century the Quarter's cheap rents and air of age and neglected decay attracted a bohemian and artistic community.
On December 21, 1965, the "Vieux Carre Historic District" was designated a National Historic Landmark.[5][6] This was in response to the planned Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway.[citation needed] Preservation activities were led by Jacob Haight Morrison, IV (1905-1974), an attorney who headed the Vieux Carre Property Owners and Association, Inc. He was the half-brother of Mayor deLesseps Story "Chep" Morrison, Sr. (1912-1963)
In the 1980s many long-term Quarter residents were driven away by rising rents as property values rose dramatically with expectations of windfalls from the planned 1984 World's Fair nearby. More of the neighborhood became developed for the benefit of tourism. The French Quarter remains a combination of residential, hotels, guest houses, bars and tourist-oriented commercial properties.
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