Mid-City is the neighborhood between Tulane Avenue, Esplanade, Bayou St. John, and Carrollton. It is residential, it is full of bars and restaurants locals actually go to, and it is the staging ground for City Park, Bayou St. John, and Jazz Fest at the Fair Grounds. If you visit New Orleans for the second or third time and you’re looking for what locals actually do here, you start here.

The Canal streetcar runs the full length of Canal Street from the river to the cemeteries and drops you straight into Mid-City. The fare is small and the ride is part of the experience. If you’ve never seen the Mid-City Cemetery district, the streetcar passes through it.

We’re at 2940 Canal Street, on the streetcar line, in the middle of all this. Stop by, get a coffee, then walk the neighborhood.

City Park is 1,300 acres — bigger than Central Park, the largest urban park in the country. The New Orleans Museum of Art, the Botanical Garden, the Sculpture Garden (free, open year-round), and Storyland are all inside it. The cypress trees around the lagoons are some of the most photographable trees in the South.

You can rent a swan boat. You can sit at the Botanical Garden’s reflecting pool for an hour and not see another tourist. You can walk through the Sculpture Garden after dark when it’s free and uncrowded.

Bayou St. John runs north from Mid-City through some of the most beautiful residential blocks in the city. You can walk it, bike it, kayak it. It is where Sunday afternoons happen for the locals who don’t go to brunch.

The Bayou Boogaloo festival happens here every May — a free, three-day music festival on the water that is everything Jazz Fest used to be before Jazz Fest got expensive.

Frenchmen Street is three blocks east of the French Quarter and a completely different city. This is where you go for live music actually played by working musicians. Snug Harbor, the Spotted Cat, d.b.a., the Maison — the lineup changes nightly. Cover charges are small or nonexistent.

The Marigny neighborhood itself is gorgeous — colorful single shotgun houses, residential streets, slower-paced bars. It is the New Orleans you came for. Bourbon Street is the New Orleans you got sold.

Magazine Street is six miles of independent shops, restaurants, and bars running through the Garden District. It is the antidote to the Quarter — actual stores selling actual things, real bookshops, real coffee shops, real food.

The Garden District itself is the residential neighborhood Magazine Street runs through. Live oaks, mansions, ironwork, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 (the historic above-ground cemetery you may have seen in the movies). Take the St. Charles streetcar from downtown — the streetcar is the destination too.

The Bywater is east of the Marigny, walking distance from Frenchmen Street. Art galleries, neighborhood bars, the Crescent Park along the river, Bacchanal Wine on Friday nights when there’s live music in the backyard. This is artist-territory New Orleans.

Crescent Park is a riverfront linear park that runs along the Mississippi. The Rusty Rainbow Bridge at the entrance is worth the photo. The river views from the park are better than anything you’ll see in the Quarter.

This is the cheapest, easiest, best secret tourist move in New Orleans. The Algiers Point ferry runs from the foot of Canal Street across the Mississippi to the historic neighborhood of Algiers Point on the West Bank. The ride is short. The view of the city from the river is the postcard view. Round-trip costs almost nothing.

Once you’re across, Algiers Point is a quiet historic neighborhood with bars, a couple of restaurants, residential blocks, and the river. Walk around for an hour, get a drink, ferry back. The whole thing takes less than a half-day and almost no tourist does it.

Tremé is the oldest Black neighborhood in the country and the birthplace of jazz. It is also one of the most-missed neighborhoods on the standard tourist route. The Backstreet Cultural Museum, St. Augustine Church, Louis Armstrong Park (Congo Square is inside it), and a number of small bars and music venues are all here.

If you want to understand New Orleans music as something other than entertainment, this is where to start. The history is dense and worth a few hours.

New Orleans food in tourist areas is mostly tourist food. The real version of every famous dish — gumbo, étouffée, red beans, po’boys, oysters — is in neighborhood restaurants that don’t advertise to visitors. You will find them by asking locals, by walking residential blocks at lunch, by following the line of cars on a Friday at noon.

If you only have one meal off the tourist track, get a po’boy at a corner-store deli in a residential neighborhood. Not at a famous place in the Quarter. The corner store version is the real one.

The streetcar lines (Canal, St. Charles, Riverfront) are an experience, not just transit. Slow, beautiful, cheap. A day pass costs less than one drink in the Quarter and gets you to almost everything on this list. If you visit New Orleans for the first time and only do one transportation thing, ride the St. Charles streetcar from Canal Street out to Uptown. The neighborhoods you’ll see from the window are the city.