New Orleans' Garden District wasn't built by accident. When wealthy Americans began arriving after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, they found themselves distinctly unwelcome in the established Creole neighborhoods downriver. So they bought up the old plantation land upriver, on higher ground, and proceeded to out-mansion their French and Spanish neighbors with a parade of Greek Revival temples that would make Athens jealous.

The result is perhaps America's most improbable residential neighborhood. Here, where sugar fortunes and steamboat money built monuments to commercial success, every block seems designed to provoke real estate envy. Colonel Short's famous cornstalk fence still draws tourists to his Italianate villa, while the Buckner Mansion looms over Jackson Avenue like an oversized wedding cake, its builder having reportedly wanted to construct "the largest house possible" to spite a rival.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reveal how these antebellum showplaces became stages for scandal, eccentricity, and American ambition, connecting the architectural rivalry between American newcomers and established Creole society while uncovering the personalities behind the porticos.