"These mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye." -- Mark Twain, speaking of the Garden District.

For many visitors and residents of New Orleans, no locale embodies the grandeur and glory of the Southern aristocracy of history and legend better than the Garden District. Where the French Quarter is vibrant and multi-textured, the Garden District is gracious and stately -- an elegantly adorned window to a bygone era.

Developed mainly between 1840 and 1900, the Garden District runs from Magazine Street to St. Charles Avenue and from Jackson Avenue to Louisiana Avenue. It comprises one of the best-preserved collections of historic mansions in the South -- if not the entire country. From the expansive, 8,000-square-foot Short Villa at 1448 Fourth Street to the simple yet elegant George Washington Cable home at 1313 Eighth Street, the Garden District is a brilliant tapestry of architectural styles and period designs.

The area had its origins in a flood that occurred upriver from the area in 1816. That year, a crevasse, or break, in the Mississippi River levee at the McCarty Plantation inundated most of the plantations between the break and the city of New Orleans. The flood resulted in a thick layer of nutrient-rich alluvial silt being deposited on the land, including the Livaudais plantation; this new layer of soil encouraged the luxuriant foliage growth that would later give the Garden District its name.

Less than a decade after the flood, the Livaudais marriage was as broken as the levee, and Madame Livaudais retired to Paris. She sold the plantation, which she had received as part of her settlement, to a group of entrepreneurs who promptly laid it out in large (for New Orleans) lots.

The spacious home sites and rich, garden-ready soil immediately began attracting wealthy New Orleanians - particularly the many well-heeled Americans that had flooded the city after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Disdained by the old French Creole gentry in the French Quarter, these new arrivals thumbed their noses at the Creoles by constructing sumptuous mansions and the Garden District was born.