“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland,” Tennessee Williams once wrote.
It’s taken a half-century, but the hotel industry in the Crescent City is finally living up to the magnificence and distinction of the real New Orleans. Now at least a dozen new boutique inns, preserving old bones with modern “hip” replacements, have opened in reimagined churches, rectories, convents, roadside motels, and even a former juvenile-detention center.
And just in time, too: within the next few weeks, thousands of visitors will arrive for the food-and-music French Quarter Festival, which kicked off on Thursday. Last year the event set an attendance record of 875,000. Next up: the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which begins on April 25 (through May 5), and drew 460,000 concertgoers last year.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the city’s hotels were either generic towers or tourist traps with Astroturf-ed bedroom floors—lipstick on a cochon. But New Orleans is decidedly not “the Big Easy” when it comes to welcoming independent hoteliers.
“It gets in its own way when it comes to challenging preservation policies,” says Jayson Seidman, a former Goldman Sachs real-estate analyst who now lives in New Orleans and owns several hotels—including the Columns, the Drifter, and Hotel Saint Vincent. “There are too many cooks in the kitchen on the planning side.”
It’s taken a half-century, but the hotel industry in the Crescent City is finally living up to the magnificence and distinction of the real New Orleans.
The new arrivals all share commonalities, no matter the room-key count: warmth provided by natural sunlight, an ample dosage of pedigreed history, comfy bedding, and 21st-century amenities. Some even have floor-to-ceiling windows that actually open.
The most spectacular of these revivalist sanctuaries is the Celestine (from $200), located in the French Quarter next door to the popular cocktail bar the Will & the Way. Its building dates to 1791, and its expansive secret garden occupies the courtyard. (Truman Capote would have swooned over it, but Williams had already done so in 1947, when he wrote a chunk of A Streetcar Named Desire there.)
The 10-room property was designed by local Sara Ruffin Costello, a former New Yorker who has been a creative director and design columnist for the interiors magazine Domino and The Wall Street Journal. “Despite the city’s famous dysfunction, I’ve been besotted with New Orleans for a long time—to me, it’s one of the last of the evocative cities left in America,” says Costello. She has a knack for finding one-of-a-kind antiques, mixing up contrasting colors, and cramming walls with frames and, in the case of the Celestine, portraits of unknowns.
Blocks away, in the city’s Central Business District, the 40-room Rubenstein Hotel (from $139) opened this winter. Located on the top floors of three historic buildings, it overlooks the oldest running streetcar line in America. It’s the first hotel from the Rubenstein family, which has operated a men’s clothing store on the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles for the past 100 years. The rooms skew minimalist modern, and the store’s vintage newspaper advertisements adorn the walls. Don’t miss the Madison Shop Bar, which makes a solid Sazerac.
One of the more unlikely arrivals—considering its past usages—is Inn at the Old Jail (from $179). Despite its name, this former drunk tank, police station and home for juvenile delinquents in Tremé is a registered historic landmark. Occupying a Queen Anne Victorian guesthouse built in 1902, it was rescued from demolition in 2013, and is owned now by “prison wardens” Todd and Nick Schwartz. Today, it consists of nine well-appointed rooms and hosts concerts and crawfish boils on the weekends.
On the other side of town, in the Lower Garden District, is the Victorian-era Hotel Saint Vincent (from $399). Previously an orphanage, it was more recently a hostel where your laptop might be stolen. Now it’s home to San Lorenzo, one of the best Italian restaurants in town, and draws locals with live music in a clandestine little bar.
In the Faubourg Marigny corridor, Hotel Peter and Paul (from $159) occupies a former church, convent, and rectory. Some of its 71 rooms are cheekily outfitted with bunk beds and gingham drapes (along with grand fireplaces and rotary phones). The Elysian Bar’s classic cocktails are complemented by small plates such as smoked-gulf-fish toast.
Having opened just in time for Jazz Fest, the Hôtel Henrietta (from $300) is one of the first built-from-the-ground-up inns to arrive in New Orleans for quite some time. On the site of what may have been a former massage parlor in the Garden District, it will be an epicenter for parade-lovers: during Mardi Gras season, the occupants of its balconies will be slaughtered with “throw” beads and trinkets while the high-school marching bands and masked krewes on horseback parade down St. Charles Avenue. Don’t forget to pack some Advil.
Steve Garbarino, the former editor at BlackBook magazine, began his career as a staff writer for The Times-Picayune. Once again New Orleans–based, he now contributes to The Wall Street Journal and New York and is the author of A Fitzgerald Companion