Shop Together
What do you collect? Whether it's toys, dolls, silver, antique jewelry, or even Newcomb pottery, you're like to find prime examples for sale in New Orleans. For generations the small shops along Royal Street in New Orleans have furnished many of the French Quarter's loveliest homes with carved, curvilinear 18th- and 19th-century masterpieces.
Visitors who appreciate relics of the more recent past will find Art-Deco pieces as well as 50s and 60s retro items on display here as well. This is the only city I know of where you can find vintage stilt-walkers' gear - in one store after the next!
Browsers and those on a budget will appreciate the fun and funky Lower Garden District, along Magazine Street. Like the French Quarter, its restaurants and art galleries are nestled among shops carrying vintage collectibles.
Street Shopping
New Orleans offers some of the most interesting and picturesque antique shopping of any American city. Royal Street between Iberville and St. Philip is the shopping Main Street of the French Quarter. Uptown Magazine Street is also famous, but not as easy to reach without a car. (In truth, the seven blocks between St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street can be walked so that the street car offers a realistic transportation option from the Quarter to Magazine Street, but some of the cross streets are more pleasing than others and the rigorous heat of the summertime precludes any lengthy pedestrian venture.) The tightest collection of interesting stores on Magazine is between Delachaise and Constantinople Streets. These are fairly highbrow offerings. There is another, more blue-collar section, good for furniture and unfinished pieces, between Melpomene and Jackson Streets.
Visit the French Market
Running along Decatur Street on the south edge of the French Quarter past Jackson Square, is a strip of four canopy-covered blocks containing the Farmer's Market and the Community Flea market. This noisy, fragrant and colorful market provides the wholesale fruit, vegetable and seafood stores for many of the best restaurants in town. The French Market also provides a bustling street fair for tourists to shop for local artifacts ranging from jewelry, to voodoo tokens, to Cajun spices, to desiccated alligator heads. Expect live music, open-air bars and street performers (and the only public restrooms in the French Quarter).
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