A Warehouse District loft where New Orleans learns to DJ and dances till two. ARORA at 828 South Peters Street is a creative performance venue and production loft that splits the difference between studio and nightclub: high-fidelity Funktion-One sound, immersive boutique lighting, and a calendar that runs from DJ Academy workshops and industry classes by day to open-decks community nights, label showcases and late-night underground parties after dark. The formula is deliberately educational as.....

Spread across 58 oak-shaded acres in Uptown New Orleans, the Audubon Zoo grew out of animal exhibits that date back to the 1884 World Cotton Centennial and the flight cage and grounds developed in the decades after; the zoo itself is generally dated to 1914. It takes its name from the artist and naturalist John James Audubon, who lived in the city in the 1820s, and it occupies a corner of Audubon Park between Magazine Street and the Mississippi River. For much of the twentieth century the zoo h.....

Cutting through the heart of the French Quarter, Bourbon Street runs about thirteen blocks from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue and is, for many visitors, shorthand for New Orleans nightlife. Its name has nothing to do with the whiskey; the royal engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the Quarter's grid in the early 1720s and named the street for the House of Bourbon, the family then ruling France. The city itself had been founded a few years earlier, in 1718. For roughly its first century and a h.....

An unmistakable feature of the New Orleans skyline, the Caesars Superdome is one of the most famous stadiums in the United States, its vast curved roof rising above the central business district. Opened in 1975, the domed arena was an engineering landmark on completion, boasting one of the largest fixed roofs of its kind in the world, and it has remained the home of the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League ever since. The stadium seats around seventy-three thousand spectators for .....

New Orleans built its party plaza on top of a dead shopping mall that was built on top of a moved cemetery. Champions Square, on LaSalle Street directly off the Caesars Superdome's Gate C grand staircase, opened on 21 August 2010 as a 13.5-million-dollar outdoor festival plaza on the footprint of the New Orleans Centre mall, which had never reopened after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005 and was demolished in spring 2010 - the site's deeper history reaches back to the Girod Street Ceme.....

New Orleans has hundreds of rooms where music happens; Chickie Wah Wah is one of the few built for listening to it. The intimate music bar at 2828 Canal Street in Mid-City, a short streetcar ride from the French Quarter, was opened in 2006 by Dale Triguero, a New York-born promoter who had cut his teeth booking club shows before moving south in the 1990s. He took over the old Canal Bus Stop dive bar and named his room after a 1956 Ace Records single by Bobby Marchan - one of the city's first dra.....

A small, characterful live-music room on Freret Street in Uptown New Orleans, Gasa Gasa earned a devoted following as one of the city's most distinctive independent venues. Housed in a converted building with an adjoining coffee-and-art space, the room blended music, visual art and community in a way that captured the creative, do-it-yourself spirit of its neighbourhood and stood apart from the city's larger and more famous music halls. The venue was an intimate space holding only a couple of h.....

On the corner where Bourbon Street begins its famous run through the French Quarter, the Hard Rock Cafe New Orleans sets the international chain down in one of the most music-steeped cities on earth. The location is apt for a brand born of rock and roll, surrounded as it is by the jazz clubs, brass bands and revelry that have made the Quarter a magnet for visitors for generations. As in every outpost, the cafe doubles as a gallery of popular-music history. Its walls and cases display the compan.....

A rare survivor of American influence in a largely Creole quarter, the Hermann-Grima House stands on Saint Louis Street as one of the finest examples of Federal-style architecture in the French Quarter. Built in 1831 for a prosperous German-born merchant named Samuel Hermann, and later home to the Grima family, the elegant brick mansion stands apart from its Spanish-colonial neighbours with its symmetrical facade, fanlight doorway and restrained classical proportions. The house is preserved as .....

In the heart of the French Quarter, House of Blues New Orleans is one of the city's most popular live-music destinations, part of a renowned national chain but steeped in the local character of its surroundings. Opened in 1994 in a complex of historic buildings on Decatur Street, the venue blends a concert hall, a restaurant and intimate side rooms into a sprawling, folk-art-filled space that celebrates the musical traditions of the American South. The main music hall holds around a thousand pe.....