Straight Streets in a Curvaceous Crescent: Colonial Urban Planning and Its Impact on Modern New Orleans

Abstract

New Orleans is justly famous for its vast inventory of historical architecture, representing scores of stylistic influences dating to the French and Spanish colonial eras. Less appreciated is the fact that the Crescent City also retains nearly original colonial urban designs. Two downtown neighborhoods, the French Quarter and Central Business District, are entirely undergirded by colonial-era planning, and dozens of other neighborhoods followed suit even after Americanization. New Orleanians who reside in these areas negotiate these colonial planning decisions in nearly every movement they make, and they reside in a state with as many colonial-era land surveying systems as can be found throughout the United States. This article explains how those patterns fell in place.