Julia Street Gallery Row and Thirteen Sisters

Why is it significant?

Stroll down the tree-lined brick sidewalks of Julia Street, the celebrated spine of the New Orleans Arts District.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stroll down the tree-lined brick sidewalks of Julia Street, the celebrated spine of the New Orleans Arts District. Known throughout the contemporary art world as "Gallery Row," this vibrant street was originally laid out in the 1830s as a prosperous residential and mercantile corridor linking the Mississippi riverfront wharves with the American Sector's financial institutions along Saint Charles Avenue.

Look at the remarkable continuous block of red-brick townhouses on the 600 block of Julia Street: this is the famous "Thirteen Sisters," a unified ensemble of thirteen four-story Federal-style row houses erected in 1833 by master builder Henry Howard and surveyor William Brand.

The Thirteen Sisters represented one of the earliest speculative urban housing developments in the American South, built for affluent cotton merchants with shared masonry party walls, granite lintels, fanlight doorways, and wrought-iron step railings. Over the twentieth century, as cotton commerce decentralized, the brick townhouses fell into industrial use, housing print shops, coffee roasting mills, and machinery storage. Hand-hewn timber lintels, original granite curbs, and gas lanterns evoke the antebellum era when wealthy cotton brokers finalized shipping contracts in these very parlors. In the 1980s, pioneering art dealers and preservationists recognized the architectural beauty of these soaring spaces, adapting the ground floors into sleek contemporary galleries with exposed brick walls, timber ceiling joists, and floor-to-ceiling glass display windows. Today, Julia Street hosts the famous First Saturday Art Openings and the annual White Linen Night festival, where thousands of art lovers dressed in crisp white linen stroll from gallery to gallery sipping wine and admiring contemporary paintings, photography, and sculpture.

Walking along Julia Street as evening shadows stretch across the weathered 1830s brickwork, the seamless harmony between historic preservation and contemporary fine art is thrilling. It is a shining example of creative urban revitalization.

Walk east along Julia Street toward the vast brick halls of the Contemporary Arts Center.