New Orleans Garden District: Celebrity Homes & Movie Sites Walk

4.93

(370 reviews)

What’s the experience like?

The first thing I noticed was the ironwork — almost lacy, but heavy in your hand if you touched it. We were standing outside a house that our guide, Marcus, said belonged to Anne Rice once. He told us she’d written about this neighborhood before most people knew it from movies. The air smelled like magnolia and something sweet I couldn’t place (jasmine? Or maybe just someone’s laundry). A group of teenagers walked by in matching Saints jerseys, laughing too loud for a Tuesday morning. It felt like the kind of place where everyone knows each other’s business.

I’ll admit, I signed up for the Garden District tour mostly to gawk at celebrity homes — John Goodman’s porch was even bigger than I expected — but what stuck with me was Marcus pointing out tiny details: the way shutters are painted “haint blue” to keep spirits away (he swore by it), or how every front garden had its own story. We passed a crew setting up lights for some TV show; they barely glanced at us, which made me feel like we were seeing something secret. Marcus had gossip about Nicholas Cage buying and losing houses here — he told it with this half-smile, like he wasn’t sure if we’d believe him.

I kept lagging behind because there’s so much to look at — old bricks underfoot, camellias spilling over fences, sunlight bouncing off windows. Someone in our group tried to pronounce one of the street names in French and totally butchered it; Marcus just grinned and said locals don’t bother either. The whole walk is only about two hours but you get these little moments that stick: a neighbor waving as she watered her plants, the sudden hush when we turned onto a quieter block. I still think about that feeling of being somewhere both famous and private at the same time.