What our own recording got wrong
Stories' Garden District walk starts at the cemetery's wall with a story about John Howard Ferguson, the judge in Plessy v. Ferguson. Until November 8, more than five weeks after the gates opened on October 1, 2026, that story still told you the city had closed the cemetery in 2019 and that "no reopening date has been given." We caught it in a review on November 8, rewrote the paragraph and recorded it again that day. The stop now tells you the cemetery reopened for guided tours and how to book one.
That is the weakness of any recording. A guide can change what she says the day she hears the news, and a recording stays exactly as it was made until someone notices and makes another one. VoiceMap's listing for its Garden District walk says it was last updated on December 4, 2025, before the reopening, and we haven't paid to hear what it says outside the gates. Tours by Foot's page still sells a GPS audio tour of the cemetery for "anytime the cemetery is open," which for now you can't use on your own, since the only way in is with a Save Our Cemeteries guide.
Guide companies' web pages lag too. As of November 10, Historic New Orleans Tours, Tours by Foot and New Orleans Legendary Walking Tours all still print that the cemetery is closed for repairs or restricted by the city. That tells you about their websites and nothing about what their guides say on the sidewalk, which we haven't checked.
What a person on the sidewalk gives you
The cemetery is the plainest case. As a visitor you can't get through that gate without a Save Our Cemeteries guide, since the city allows guided tours only and the Preservation Resource Center names that department as the sole tour provider. You pay $30, or $15 for ages 6 to 12, for 90 minutes. No audio tour changes that, ours included.
Questions come next, because every recording here talks one way and you will have some. You will want to know why a fence on Fourth Street is made of corn, or whose house that is, and a person can answer and a phone can't. You also get far more explanation for the time. A guided walk here takes about two hours to cover about a mile, so most of those two hours is someone talking to you. Our whole walk is 54 minutes, and adding up the times on its page, that is about 32 minutes of walking and 20 of listening. If this is your first time in New Orleans and you want to understand why the neighborhood looks the way it does, two hours with a person will teach you more than an hour with us.
What a recording gives you
Time is the first reason. Guided walks start at set hours, mostly 10:30, 11:00 or 2:00, and Historic New Orleans Tours wants you booked more than an hour ahead. A recording starts when you do, stops while you buy a coffee at the Rink, and picks up again when you're ready. That matters more than it sounds if you're coming off the 9:00 cemetery tour, or if a flight lands at noon and your afternoon is an hour long.
Money is the second, and the difference grows with the group. Guided walks are priced by the person, $29 at Historic New Orleans Tours, $29.99 at New Orleans Legendary and $37 at Two Chicks Walking Tours, with Tours by Foot giving a range of $19 to $29 for its neighborhood tours. Audio is priced by the purchase, $4.99 to $11.99, so four adults pay $116 on Historic New Orleans Tours' walk and $4.99 for ours. The third reason is simply that some people don't want to walk in a group, and nothing is wrong with that.
If you go with audio, ours is not the strongest one
VoiceMap's walk is the one we'd measure ourselves against. It is narrated by David Hedges, who pursued his tour guide license in 2011 and started Nola Tour Guy the next year, and it has 30 locations on a 1.3-mile route, the same length as ours, plays by GPS on its own and works offline. Its listing shows 709 ratings averaging 4.8 out of 5. It costs $11.99, or 15% to 50% off when you buy for a group. Stories has eight stops and a synthetic voice, costs $4.99 for a group on up to four phones, and plays the first stop free in a browser before you pay anything, though GPS playback and offline need the iPhone app.
Tours by Foot's $6.99 Garden District audio arrives as audio files, a PDF and a Google map, so you press play yourself at each stop. Tours Bayou's $5.95 download is presented by Pamela Pipes, a seventh-generation New Orleanian, with maps and pictures. If you are one or two people and the price doesn't matter, we'd pick VoiceMap's narrator over our voice. If you are three or four, ours costs less, and either one lets you hear a sample before you pay: VoiceMap has a preview on its page, and our first stop plays free.
A first morning gets a person, a spare hour gets a recording
If this is your first time and you have a morning, take a person, and book the cemetery too. If you've got an hour between things, children who won't stand on a sidewalk for two hours, or four people and a small budget, take a recording and don't feel you've missed the point. It is a mile of beautiful houses either way, and you'll see them from the same sidewalk. If the start times are the question, our page on which tour to book works through the hours and costs, and if the cemetery is the reason you're here, start with how to get inside.
Judge our voice on stop 1, free
Published by Winding AI, Inc., the company that makes Stories. Prices, schedules and what each company says about the cemetery were read from their own pages on November 10, 2026. The cemetery's status is from the City of New Orleans and the Preservation Resource Center. Corrections are welcome at support@winding.ai.