Downriver from the Marigny, Bywater has become the most energetic creative enclave in post-Katrina New Orleans — a working-class riverside district of shotgun houses, corner bars, and studio spaces that has drawn artists, musicians, chefs, and writers in the years since the 2005 flood. Bywater sits downriver from the Marigny, bounded by the Mississippi on one side and the Industrial Canal on the other, and its streets of modest nineteenth-century Creole cottages are painted in the kind of vivid subtropical colors that signal a neighborhood that takes beauty seriously. The neighborhood flooded in 2005 when the levees failed after Hurricane Katrina, and the recovery here was gradual and artist-driven: people who could not afford the French Quarter and Uptown neighborhoods came to Bywater for the cheap rents and found a community of people doing the same thing.
The result is a neighborhood dense with small restaurants, indie coffee shops, art galleries, and live music venues that feel discovered rather than manufactured. The Crescent Park, accessed from the Bywater riverfront, offers one of the best views of the Mississippi and the downtown skyline. The neighborhood's identity is still being negotiated as rising rents push against the creative community that created its appeal — a familiar tension in cities everywhere, but felt with particular poignancy in a city where neighborhood character has always been the primary civic value.