One block over from Bourbon Street, Royal Street shows you the French Quarter's other face: refined, artistic, and, by many accounts, the most beautiful street in New Orleans. Royal Street is the antique and gallery corridor of the French Quarter, lined with shops selling nineteenth-century French furniture, silver, oil paintings, estate jewelry, and rare books alongside contemporary galleries showcasing Louisiana artists. The architecture along Royal is among the finest in the Quarter: Spanish colonial buildings with stuccoed brick facades, inner courtyard gardens visible through carriage gates, and the elaborate cast-iron balconies that photographers come from around the world to capture.
The ironwork here is not the machine-stamped decorative metal of later eras but hand-crafted work by the Black and Creole artisans who built this city in the nineteenth century. Look for the Cornstalk Fence at the corner of Royal and Dumaine, a cast-iron fence in the shape of cornstalks that was cast in Philadelphia and installed around 1859 as a wedding gift. Street musicians set up along Royal through the afternoon, the sound of a solo saxophone or trumpet rising and mixing with the Quarter's ambient noise.
This is New Orleans at its most photogenic.