Hey Y'all Andrew here with Free Tours by Foot New Orleans. Today, I'm going to share with you
some things you can do in New Orleans for absolutely free.
The most important of these is festivals. We are a festival
town. There are more festivals in South Louisiana than days of
the year, and a lot of them are free to attend. Mardi Gras, for
For example, the only people paying to attend the Mardi Gras parade
are the very small part of the crowd that's watching from
bleachers or a balcony and the people in the parade. They pay
for the privilege of putting on the biggest free show in the
world. And the beads and stuff they threw? Paid for by the
person throwing them. Some of them do it just for love of the
holiday and some of them do it because they own the hotel
where you're staying or the restaurant where you had lunch
and they more than make their money back. But either way you
get the experience for free. Another free festival we host
every year is French Quarter Fest. It's a music festival, a
a lot like our more famous Jazz Fest, but it's almost all local
bands in the whole gamut of local styles and they're spread
out on a bunch of stages all across the French Quarter. It's
completely free to attend. It's usually in April, which means great weather, although in 2021 it's happening in late
September and early October. If you're going to be visiting
town, you can find information on new orleans.com and other
local websites about these and other free festivals and the
website of the festival itself is the best place to go looking
for admission information. But, even when there's no entrance
fee, it is worth bringing some cash with you when you go to a
festival. Outside food and drinks generally aren't allowed
and there's always plenty of both for sale. While we're
talking about music, there's a lot of music in town that looks
free, but really isn't, at least not if you want musicians to be
paid for their work. Musicians at festivals are generally paid
pretty well and if a venue charges a cover that usually is
going toward paying the musicians too. On Bourbon Street
and at some bars on Frenchman Street, there's no cover and a
one drink minimum. What that means depends on the venue, but
often it means the musicians are relying on tips. The same
goes for street musicians. They aren't managed or paid by the
city, so they make whatever gets thrown in their bucket, so
it wouln't be accurate for us to call that free music. But, it
can be low-cost music. Even you throwing a little bit in the
bucket has a ripple effect by helping other listeners
standing nearby understand how the system works. Back to the
free stuff. There's one music venue in town that has a pretty
unusual tradition. It's an uptown bar on Magazine Street
called Le Bon Temps Roule. Look on the screen for the spelling. If
you don't speak French, it makes no sense, and if you do
speak French, it makes even less sense. Anyway, on Fridays,
Le Bon Temps Roule offers free oysters. They have a food menu
too, so it's easy to mix that up with a bigger meal and
there's live music at the same time. Starts at seven and
continues until they run out, so get there early. If music is
part of your interest in New Orleans, then one free space
worth visiting is Louis Armstrong Park. It's just
outside the French Quarter in the neighborhood called the
Treme and it's occasionally a festival site, but it's also a
monument to jazz and other musical history, and it's the
place where some of that history happened. The park
contains Congo Square, a spot originally just outside the
town limits, where enslaved people spent Sundays
socializing, buying from one another, dancing and drumming. And
the drumming and dancing are a living tradition, so you can
actually can enjoy some free music there on Sunday
afternoons. There's not a hard start time, but around three is
usually a safe bet. Other parks are naturally also free to
attend. There's Crescent Park a long strip landscape with
native plants that begins right outside the French Quarter and
runs along the riverfront of the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods. Uptown beyond the Garden District, You got
Audubon Park, a huge green space next to the mansions of Saint
Charles Avenue and with the Audubon Zoo nested inside. Over
across the Mississippi River bit of a drive from the main
tourist area is Barataria Preserve, a huge national park
that preserves local wetlands. And in the Mid-City
neighborhood, just a streetcar ride away from the French
Quarter, is City Park, which has nature preserves that are free
to visit plus some reasonably priced other things to do, like
the New Orleans Museum of Art, that museum's sculpture garden,
the Botanical Garden, a children's museum, a kids theme
park, which is free for children, and a location of Cafe
du Monde right by a beautiful bayou. While you're out at City
Park, you can also find a couple of other free
attractions in Mid-City. One is the Fairgrounds racecourse.
General admission at the race course is free, although they
do charge for some seating and for other services that they
offer. They enforce a resort casual dress code in some of
the paid areas, but the free portions are come as you are.
And once in a while, they also host exotic racing, where you
can watch competitions between zebras Emus or Wiener dogs.
Another attraction near City Park is Saint Louis Cemetery #3. Cemeteries are a pretty big tourist attraction
in New Orleans, and while the cemeteries themselves don't
charge admission, most visitors do end up paying to see one
because they take a tour. And a tour is the only way to see
Saint Louis Cemetery #1, the city's oldest cemetery,
which is just outside the French Quarter. But, the rest of
them are free to enter and Saint Louis #3 is a great mix of historic and modern, and it's just a short
walk away from City Park. Indoor historic spaces aren't
free nearly as often as outdoor ones, but there are several
museums in town that are free, sometimes or all the time. The main one is the Historic New Orleans Collection. It's actually a series of spaces across the French Quarter,
including two museums in buildings on either side of
Royal Street, a historic home, and if you like the idea of
getting behind the scenes a little, the Williams Research
Center, which is a comprehensive resource for researching any property in the French Quarter. They're all free to visit anytime they're open. Also, free to enter, Saint Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. When they're not holding mass or another ceremony, the building is open to visitors. And all throughout the year, but especially in December, they also host free concerts with both religious and secular music. Keep an eye out in front of the building for information about those events. There are a few other free museums in the French Quarter and they're generally small spaces attached to businesses, that tell more about the history of that business or its industry. A place called the Cigar Factory on Decatur Street, not only makes and sells cigars, but
also shows artifacts from back when the city had a booming
cigar trade, back in the late nineteenth century. There's also a business called Bevello. They're the people behind a lot of the picturesque gas lamps all throughout the French Quarter. They've got a museum in their showroom dedicated to the first municipal gas lighting system in the country, located in New Orleans, and you can watch the process there, as the company's craftsmen build copper fixtures for gas lamps too. And then there's Arnaud's, a classic Creole restaurant just off Bourbon Street. They've got a museum of costumes from Mardi Gras balls that were worn by members of the owning family. If you happen to have a Louisiana ID, you can also benefit from a free day once a week at two of the major art museums in town, The New Orleans Museum of Art on Wednesdays and the Ogden Museum of Southern Artists on Thursdays. If you're not lucky enough to live in Louisiana, there are still lots of free ways to see art first. If you haven't spent much time around art galleries before, it's okay to go inside an art gallery, even if you aren't planning to buy anything. Most people aren't, so you don't have to worry about pushy salespeople in the French Quarter. You'll find the galleries along with the antique stores on Royal Street, just behind Jackson Square, not far off in the business district. There's another walkable strip of art galleries on Julia Street, and there are some more spread out gallery corridors on Magazine Street Uptown and Saint Claude Avenue downtown. Those four gallery districts all have their own free art walk events, in some cases annually, and in some cases even monthly. And you can find art on display every day on the fence around Jackson Square and at art markets on Decatur Street in the Quarter and on Frenchman Street, too. If you're not familiar with the streets and neighborhood names that I'm saying, then the free activity for you might be a self-guided tour. We have written tours on our website linked below of lots of different parts of town, which can help you explore them at your own pace or even just have as a reference material as you wander around on your own chosen route. And as the name Free Tours by Foot suggests, our guided tours fall in this category too The guided tours we offer in New Orleans and elsewhere cost either nothing or a couple of bucks reservation fee to attend, and from there, you pay whatever you see fit at the end. Basically, we're like street musicians, but street storytellers. And if you feel like this video might save you money and you want to find our tip bucket, it is in the description below. One more thing that's free - all of our other videos. You can check out the rest of our channel for walking tours around this and many more cities, more advice videos and live Q and A's. And it doesn't cost but a couple of clicks to hit like and subscribe. Let us know in the comments what other free or affordable activities you've enjoyed in town, people watching definitely counts. Thank you for watching and see you next time.
