Orleans County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Orleans County

Orleans is the only Louisiana parish whose boundary follows a single municipality's incorporated city limits exactly — the parish IS New Orleans, with no unincorporated land and no other cities inside the parish boundary, a consolidation enshrined in the Louisiana state constitution of 1898 and unique among US county-equivalent jurisdictions. The city sits at an average 6 ft below sea level, with roughly half the developed area below the Mississippi River high-water line, making it the largest US city by population with a majority below-sea-level footprint per USGS elevation modeling. The pump-and-levee system that keeps the bowl drained operates 24 of the Sewerage and Water Board's drainage pump stations on a federal-USACE flood-protection grid rebuilt post-Hurricane Katrina under the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS, $14.5 billion as-built cost per US Army Corps). The French Quarter is the oldest neighborhood (1718 founding by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville under French colonial charter), the only continuously-inhabited French colonial-era street grid in the United States.

RV access into the French Quarter itself is effectively prohibited by 9-ft height-restricted street signs at Decatur, Royal, and Bourbon, plus city-code overnight parking bans throughout the Vieux Carré. Commercial RV-friendly sites cluster on the West Bank at Bayou Segnette State Park (15 miles from downtown via Crescent City Connection bridge, accepting rigs to 50 ft with full hookups, 98 sites on the Louisiana State Parks reservation system) and at private parks in Metairie and Slidell. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar (the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world, in service since 1835) is the canonical car-free downtown-access route from West Bank staging. Hurricane-season planning (June-November) means rig departure routes should be checked against NOAA Lower Mississippi Forecast Center cone-of-uncertainty maps; I-10 westbound to Baton Rouge or I-59 northbound to Hattiesburg are the two state-managed contra-flow evacuation routes for any named storm landfall.