French Quarter Manual: An Architectural Guide to New Orleans's Vieux Carré

In New Orleans, the French Quarter packs itself into a little grid of a colonial town behind the levee of the Mississippi River. Established in 1718, the town received its gridded plan from a French military engineer in 1721. Most of the buildings standing today date from the nineteenth century, with eighteenth- and twentieth-century structures interspersed.

This detailed architectural handbook describes how to “read” French Quarter architecture by determining a structure’s “type,” its …