Low storefronts run along Oak Street, with camelback houses and a streetcar barn on the blocks behind.
What Carrollton looks like
Oak Street runs low and narrow, one and two story storefronts with fabric awnings out over the sidewalk and painted signs stacked above the doors. The and Jacques-Imo's Cafe sit side by side near the Leake Avenue end, a pickup truck permanently parked at the curb between them with a table built into its flatbed.
Off the commercial blocks, single and double shotgun houses run one room wide toward the back lot. Some carry a second story built only over the rear rooms, the camelback form that adds a bedroom without raising the whole roofline. Bracketed porches and rusticated wood fronts in the Italianate style outnumber the plainer cottages, with Colonial Revival and bungalow porches mixed in on the later blocks.
The streetcar runs down Carrollton Avenue's planted median under a row of live oaks, the tracks ending a block away at a barn on Willow Street. Inside, the cars sit up on blocks under steel roof trusses and a slate roof, between service runs.
Near the bend where the avenue meets St. Charles Avenue, keeps its twenty-nine stools lined along one long counter. A few blocks down, has a columned Greek Revival portico facing the tracks and now serves as an assisted living facility.
The ground here sits low enough that a levee along the river blocks any view of the water from inside the neighborhood. Flat blocks run right up against it, with no rise or high building breaking the skyline behind.
Shot in Carrollton
Camellia Grill played a 1950s diner in the Freak Show season of FX's American Horror Story. Elsa Mars and Jimmy Darling first appear on screen there in the premiere episode, and a later scene has Dell Toledo beat Jimmy up outside after the diner's staff turns the sideshow performers away.
Treme
The Maple Leaf Bar
The Maple Leaf keeps its own name across Treme, the regular bar for the show's musician characters. In a season-two episode, the Rebirth Brass Band plays one of its real Tuesday night residencies there while Janette and Jacques watch from one table and Toni and Sofia visit separately. Street View
Houston Heights has the same narrow lot, single family scale as Carrollton, with one and two story frame houses behind shallow front yards. More than a hundred of them are individually listed on the National Register, and the block by block texture holds together end to end. Houston Heights keeps no working streetcar line and no levee at the end of its streets, so either would need dressing in a wide shot. Its houses also run boxier and taller than Carrollton's shotguns. Try searching narrow lot frame houses now.
Oakleigh Garden Historic District in Mobile, Alabama
Oakleigh Garden's cottages run Italianate and Craftsman detail under a canopy of live oaks, the same architectural mix and street cover as Carrollton's blocks off Oak Street. Raised entrances and deeper front galleries set the porches apart from Carrollton's shallower ones. Mobile's lots run wider and its streets carry no streetcar or barn, so a tighter frame on porch and facade works better than a wide establishing shot. Try searching Italianate cottages under live oaks now.
