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.....

Set on the Mississippi riverfront at the edge of the French Quarter, the Audubon Aquarium opened on Canal Street in September 1990 and broke attendance records for a United States aquarium on its first day, drawing more than 13,000 visitors. It anchors the riverside Woldenberg Park and is run by the Audubon Nature Institute, the non-profit that also operates the city's zoo and several other conservation sites. A consortium of local architects gave it a wave-like silhouette and a sweep of glass f.....

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.....

Its first job was hosting a World's Fair. The building that became the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center opened its Great Hall for the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition - the last World's Fair held on American soil - then welcomed its first trade show, a helicopter exhibition, in January 1985. Named for Ernest "Dutch" Morial, New Orleans's first African American mayor, the centre stretches nearly eleven blocks along the Mississippi River at 900 Convention Center Boulevard. Expansions.....

The French Quarter, known to locals as the Vieux Carré, is the historic heart of New Orleans and one of the most atmospheric districts in the United States. Laid out in 1718 by French colonists, it is the city's oldest neighbourhood, and despite its name much of its surviving architecture is Spanish, the legacy of devastating fires in the late eighteenth century that swept away the original French buildings during a period of Spanish rule. That layered colonial past gives the Quarter its disti.....

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.....