Faubourg Marigny — faubourg is the French word for suburb — began as the plantation of Bernard de Marigny, one of the most colorful characters in a city with a long history of colorful characters. Marigny was born in 1785 into one of the wealthiest Creole families in Louisiana and inherited a fortune at age fifteen. He proceeded to spend most of it with spectacular enthusiasm: gambling, dueling, throwing legendary parties, and developing his plantation into a residential neighborhood in 1806.
He is credited with introducing the dice game craps to the United States, having learned it in France and brought it back to the gambling halls of New Orleans. The streets he platted are named with the whimsy of a man who had spent too much time at card tables: Elysian Fields, Love, Treasure, Poet. The Marigny today is a dense, walkable neighborhood of Creole cottages — modest, colorful shotgun houses and single-story homes with front porches built tight to the sidewalk — that has been home to successive waves of immigrants, Creole families, bohemians, and musicians.
It sits just downriver from the French Quarter, which spills into it at the boundary of Esplanade Avenue, and shares much of the Quarter's architectural character without its tourist intensity.