“i love new orleans physically. i love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. i have a beautiful house here.”
The garden district tour: Cemetery, anne rice, and true crime
Long before the New Orleans of today, the city remained confined to the Vieux Carre, better known as the French Quarter. Filled with French residents first and Spanish residents following, these cultures created the city we know and love today. But, in 1803, in a shocking move, Napoleon Bonaparte sold the entire Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson’s United States, doubling the size of the still fledgling country. The French and Spanish residents protested in Jackson Square, determined to keep out the Americans and to keep them from infringing on otherwise, Caribbean and European space.
Our Garden District Tour is not your grandmother’s Garden District Tour. Sure, it shares some history and some architecture but, like everything we do at Hottest Hell Tours, we created a different kind of Garden District Tour filled with salacious details and stories ranging from literature to true crime and long time family secrets! Curated by our very own guides, who worked diligently to ensure this tour would be as captivating as our other tours, we are sure this tour will titillate your history buds as well as your dark history needs!
After a brief lesson on the differences between cribs, brothels, and salons, this 90-minute excursion gets juicy. Guests are treated to details about New Orleans’ “sex circuses” and scandalous animal shows; how powerful madams kept the city’s politicians under their well-manicured thumbs; and the way organized sex work created the perfect environment for the birth of jazz. Visitors can expect to hear about future icons Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton (then just broke artists trying to make a few dollars for dinner), shameless powerbrokers like Tom Anderson (a brothel owner with more clout than City Hall itself), and buxom goddesses of business like Lulu White, Josie Arlington, and Willie Piazza, who turned rags into diamond-encrusted riches. By the end of the tour you’ll understand why everything people love about New Orleans today is owed to, and still tied to, Storyville...and its army of workers.
If you’re looking for something less familiar than the usual “haunted history”—but just as entertaining as a good piece of vampire lore—this journey through scandals, mysteries, legends, and horrors are exactly what the doctor ordered!
Why Choose Us:
- Adults-only experience
- Rated 5 stars on TripAdvisor
- Small groups of no more than 20 people
- Our award-winning team of historians and esoteric experts exhaustively research the stories we share
- Decades of combined experience
- Customer safety and entertainment are our top priorities
- No cheap scares or parlor tricks - we keep it real
- Locally owned and operated by New Orleans natives
Questions? Prefer to book your tour by phone?
CALL US: 1-888-975-HELL
Meeting Location
1201 St. Louis Street.
TICKET PRICES
$44 for Adults, $39 for Students and Military
TIMES
Please arrive 30 minutes prior to tour start time.