Filming in the French Quarter, New Orleans

Almost nothing here is older than 1794. Fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed about eighty percent of the city's buildings, and the Spanish rebuilt under codes that banned wooden siding. Brick went up in its place, covered in stucco and painted. Flat tiled roofs replaced the steep French ones.

The Old Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street is the exception, finished in 1752 and the oldest surviving French colonial building in the country.

Cast iron came later. Two storeys of it went up with the Pontalba Buildings on Jackson Square in 1851, and the same galleries soon replaced the timber ones on Royal Street. Locally a balcony hangs off the wall and a gallery stands on posts at the curb, which is why so much of the sidewalk is under cover.

Little has changed since 1936, when a state constitutional amendment gave the Vieux Carré Commission power over every exterior alteration in the district. It runs from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue and back to North Rampart.

Ground level is about five feet above the sea, high for New Orleans. Most of the city flooded in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Quarter did not, beyond shallow water in a few streets. Some buildings took wind damage.

The streets are narrow enough that Film New Orleans asks for drones no wider than three feet, and trucks over thirty-one feet go to base camp. Louisiana pays back 25% of what a production spends in the state and 15% of resident payroll. The 5% for shooting outside the New Orleans metro area does not apply here.