Esplanade Avenue was once the grandest residential boulevard in Creole New Orleans, a wide, oak-canopied avenue lined with antebellum mansions that served as the Creole aristocracy's answer to the American Garden District uptown. Esplanade Avenue runs from the French Quarter at the river all the way to City Park and the Fair Grounds, and its three miles of live-oak canopy, broken only by cross streets, create one of the most dramatic streetscapes in the South. The mansions along Esplanade were built by the Creole families — French and Spanish descent, often with some African heritage — who dominated New Orleans society before the Louisiana Purchase and who refused to move Uptown after the Americans arrived.
The Americans clustered above Canal Street; the Creoles stayed below it, in what they continued to call the French Quarter and along the grand boulevards that radiated from it. The houses along Esplanade represent every architectural style that passed through New Orleans in the nineteenth century: Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, and the distinctly local raised cottage form. Many have been converted to bed-and-breakfasts, their gardens carefully maintained behind iron fences.
The avenue is particularly beautiful in spring when the azaleas under the oaks are in bloom, and on Sunday afternoons when brass bands practice in the neutral ground — the New Orleans term for the median strip — at the park end.