Nineteenth-century cotton warehouses and commercial buildings fill the Warehouse District, transformed beginning in the 1980s into New Orleans' dense concentration of galleries, museums, restaurants, and boutique hotels. The Warehouse District sits between the French Quarter and the Garden District, bounded by the river and by the elevated Pontchartrain Expressway, and its large-floor-plate brick buildings proved ideal for conversion into the kind of gallery spaces that contemporary art requires. The transformation accelerated around the 1984 World's Fair, which was held on the riverfront here, and the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, established in 1976, helped anchor the district's artistic identity before the commercial development followed.
Today the district is home to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the National WWII Museum, and dozens of commercial galleries, along with hotels, restaurants, and the kind of urban street life that grows around cultural institutions. The concentration of creative economy in this relatively small area has made it one of the more economically active parts of the city, though the relationship between arts-driven gentrification and the displacement of longer-term residents is a tension that New Orleans, like every American city, has not resolved. The Julia Street gallery corridor, lined with established galleries representing both local and international artists, hosts an Art Walk on the first Saturday of each month.