Columns
The St. Charles Avenue porch hotel, remade carefully enough that the old bones still speak.
Garden District
Columns has always been less a hotel than a civic room with bedrooms attached. The Italianate mansion sits directly on St. Charles Avenue, and the porch remains one of the better places in the city to watch the streetcar pass with a cold drink and no urgent plan.
The current version is more polished than its old bohemian self, but the essential proposition holds: high ceilings, old wood, slow afternoons, Uptown just outside the gate. The restaurant and bar make it useful even if you are not staying there.
Book it when you want the Garden District and Magazine Street within reach, and when being slightly removed from the French Quarter feels like a feature rather than a logistical problem.
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