Shotgun houses and Creole cottages sit close to the street, with old wharves and a rail line along the river behind them.
What Bywater looks like
Bywater is mostly single story shotgun houses and Creole cottages, painted in bright colors and set close to the road with only a narrow strip of grass between them. Their gable ends face the street, and many still keep their original porch columns and low iron fences.
Frady's, a corner grocery and po-boy counter at Dauphine and Piety streets, still runs behind its own hand painted sign. A few blocks over, sits under a tin roof at the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps, with neon beer signs lit in the windows and string lights strung along its porch.
The neighborhood ends at the Mississippi River, where runs along a stretch of old wharves and rail sidings. Graffiti covers the concrete piers left from the docks, and a flood gate crosses the floodwall and the rail tracks where the park's bridges come down to the water. Mandeville Wharf, an open-air event space, sits inside the shell of a former wharf shed.
A freight line runs along the neighborhood's western edge on , backed by chain link fencing and open lots. St. Claude Avenue is the wider commercial street to the west, past a shuttered service station with a curved canopy and yellow tape strung across its pumps.
Shot in Bywater
Two of Bywater's bars have appeared on screen as themselves. Vaughan's Lounge stands in for a bar in one film and plays its own Thursday night gig in a series, and 's courtyard appears under its own name in the same series.
Deep Water, 2022
Vaughan's Lounge
Played the fictional town of Little Wesley, present day
Vic meets friends for lunch at Vaughan's Lounge, a corner bar at Dauphine and Lesseps streets that has been open since 1959. The same film later finds a private investigator's car near the old Dixie Beer mural on Franklin Avenue, a few blocks away.
Treme
Kermit Ruffins plays himself in the HBO series Treme. For years he had a standing Thursday night gig at Vaughan's with his band the Barbecue Swingers, set up in the front corner of the room. He ended the residency in 2013 after nearly twenty years.
Treme
Bacchanal's courtyard
Bacchanal's courtyard and its outdoor cooking appear in the HBO series Treme. The scene shows the musician Jon Cleary playing while the character Janette Desautel cooks there, after her own restaurant has closed.
What Bywater can double for
Freedmen's Town in Houston, Texas
Freedmen's Town still has rows of narrow shotgun houses, some set along streets paved with brick laid by hand in the 1920s and 1930s, close to Bywater's own scale. The row on Victor Street keeps ten of them side by side. Modern townhomes now stand between many of the surviving houses, and the brick paving there looks different in a wide shot from Bywater's asphalt streets. Try searching brick streets shotgun houses now.
Red Hook's brick warehouses sit along cobblestone streets close to the water, several of them converted into studios and shops much like Bywater's own riverfront buildings. Rusted trolley track from an abandoned 1990s streetcar line still shows through the pavement on a few blocks. Red Hook's warehouses stand taller and heavier than anything in Bywater, so a tight frame along the cobblestones works better than a wide view of the block. Try searching cobblestone streets brick warehouses now.
Cuyler-Brownville in Savannah, Georgia
Cuyler-Brownville still has a row of gable front shotgun houses from the same working class building boom as Bywater's own. Each one is a single room wide with a porch set close to the sidewalk. Only a few of those rows survive there now, unlike Bywater's continuous blocks, so a location scout would frame a single stretch rather than a whole street. Try searching gable front shotgun houses now.
