Garden District car service.

The Garden District doesn't announce itself. It waits behind iron gates and hundred-year-old oaks, and lets you decide how closely to look.

Laid out in the 1830s and 1840s on the old Livaudais plantation, the Garden District was built by American newcomers who wanted room the French Quarter couldn't offer — deep lots, wide galleries, and gardens that gave the neighborhood its name. What survives today is one of the best-preserved collections of antebellum architecture in the United States: Greek Revival, Italianate, and Second Empire mansions running along Prytania, Third, First, and Chestnut, with St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street bracketing the whole thing.

It is also, quietly, where a great many people who value privacy choose to stay. The houses here have passed among writers, actors, musicians, and clients who would prefer their names stay out of it. Anne Rice wrote her vampires into these blocks. Film crews shut down these streets for weeks and the neighbors barely look up.

Lagniappe Chauffeured Services provides private Garden District car service for exactly that clientele — plus the wedding parties, hotel guests, and visitors who want to see the neighborhood properly. Every ride is flat-rate, unmarked, and handled by a chauffeur who can tell you the history of the house you just passed, or say nothing at all.

Your chauffeur turns off St. Charles just as the streetcar rattles past, and the noise of the city drops away in a single block. The engine goes quiet. Gas lamps flicker on porches lit the same way in 1857. Through the glass, you pass Greek Revival columns, cast-iron cornstalk fences, and the double galleries where families have taken their evening drinks for six generations.

This is the part of New Orleans that never had to advertise. The mansions along Prytania and Third Street have changed hands quietly for two centuries. Touring artists rent the guest houses. Every February, the same porches fill with people who have flown a long way to be somewhere nobody will bother them.

That's why a black car matters more in the Garden District than almost anywhere else in the city. There's no valet line, no lobby, no crowd — just a car at the curb, a chauffeur who already has the address, and a door that closes behind you before anyone has looked twice.

And he will have the story if you want it. Our chauffeurs grew up here. They can tell you why the tombs at Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 sit above ground, which oak on Prytania predates the streetcar line, and which restaurant on Magazine will hold a table past close. It's a tour if you want one and a silent ride if you don't — and the difference is one sentence from the back seat.

By the time the evening's over — dinner at Commander's Palace, a table on Magazine Street, a late drink somewhere with no sign out front — the car is already waiting where you left it. Book hourly service for the full evening, or arrange event transportation for a wedding party.