Uptown New Orleans chauffeur service.

St. Charles Avenue runs from Lee Circle to Carrollton under a continuous ceiling of live oaks. It is the reason people fall in love with this city, and the reason driving here is impossible eleven days of the year.

Uptown is the long, green half of New Orleans — running from the Garden District up through the university corridor to the Riverbend, bounded by the Mississippi on one side and Claiborne on the other. It holds Audubon Park and Zoo, Tulane and Loyola, the mansions of St. Charles Avenue, the length of Magazine Street, and the neutral ground where the world's oldest continuously operating streetcar line has run since 1835.

It also holds the Mardi Gras parade route. For two weeks each year, St. Charles Avenue is closed, barricaded, and packed shoulder to shoulder — and the difference between a good day and a miserable one comes down to whether someone who knows the cross streets is driving.

Lagniappe Chauffeured Services provides private Uptown chauffeur service year-round: university move-ins and parent weekends, Audubon galas, Magazine Street dinners, airport transfers, and parade-season transportation planned around the published route closures.

Start at Lee Circle and head Uptown. The streetcar clatters alongside on the neutral ground, and the avenue opens into its canopy — oaks that were planted when the mansions behind them were new, and that have been dropping leaves on the same iron fences for a century and a half.

Past Jackson and Louisiana, the Garden District gives way to the long residential run: Second Empire towers, columned Greek Revival, a Richardsonian Romanesque pile in dark stone. Around Audubon Park the road bends with the river, and Tulane and Loyola face each other across the avenue with the park behind them. Then Carrollton, the Riverbend, and the levee.

That's the whole case for a chauffeur Uptown. The avenue is beautiful and slow and full of streetcars, cyclists, potholes older than most of the people in the car, and — for two weeks a year — a hundred thousand people standing in the street catching beads. Being driven means you get the view instead of the traffic.

During Carnival specifically, it means something more practical. Parade days close St. Charles entirely for hours at a stretch. Getting from an Uptown house to a dinner downtown, or from a hotel to a viewing spot, means knowing which cross streets are still open and where a vehicle can legally stage. Our chauffeurs plan around the published route and closure schedules rather than discovering them at the barricade.

The rest of the year Uptown is simply a pleasure to be driven through. Dinner on Magazine, a gala at Audubon's Tea Room, a graduation at Tulane, or a slow evening loop under the oaks with the windows down. Book hourly as-directed service and keep the car for the duration.