Most groups come to New Orleans and do Bourbon Street or Frenchmen Street. Both are legitimate. But there is a third bar district that almost no out-of-town group discovers on their own, and it’s the one that locals actually use when they go out in their own city.
Magazine Street through Uptown is a six-mile commercial corridor that switches character every few blocks. The stretch from Louisiana Avenue to Nashville Avenue concentrates something specific: a dense sequence of neighborhood bars, corner dives, sports taverns, and casual spots that have been serving the same zip codes for decades. The clientele is Uptown residents, Tulane and Loyola students, nurses and medical staff from the hospitals nearby, and anyone who lives within a ten-minute walk and doesn’t want to drive to the French Quarter.
This is a bar district designed for the people who live in the neighborhood. That is exactly why it works for groups who want something different.
Quick Checklist
- Walk the route before committing the group — send one or two people ahead to check which spots have enough room for 15+ and which are too small to absorb a large party
- Rideshare or streetcar to the starting point; don’t drive — parking on upper Magazine is neighborhood residential and metered commercial, and you don’t want to coordinate 18 people’s cars at the end of the night
- Bring small bills; cash is accepted everywhere on this corridor and preferred at many of the older bars
- Build in a dinner anchor — the Magazine corridor has enough casual restaurant options that the group can eat on the strip rather than before or after, which helps pace the evening
- Set a departure point and communicate it at the start of the night; groups that don’t set a “we reconvene here at X” anchor lose people as the night progresses
- Tell the group the ending: the crawl returns down Magazine toward the St. Charles streetcar stop — that’s the exit strategy, and people who know the exit strategy make better decisions during the night
- Check what’s playing at the sports bars in advance if your group has game-day interest; some nights the Uptown sports bars are packed around specific games and need advance arrival
Why This Strip Works for Large Groups
Bourbon Street has the infrastructure for large groups — it’s designed around volume — but it offers the same experience to every visitor, which is increasingly the problem. Frenchmen Street has the live music but only supports groups of about six to eight in any given venue before the floor fills up and movement stops.
Magazine Street through Uptown has a different structure. The bars here range from fifty-person capacity to standing-room in a small box, but they’re dense enough and varied enough that a group of twenty can move between three or four options in a single block radius, finding the right size and energy at each.
| District | What It Offers | Group Challenge |
|---|---|---|
| Bourbon Street | Volume, open containers, no pretense | Tourist experience, not a local one |
| Frenchmen Street | Live music, authentic vibe | Small venues, full by midnight |
| Magazine / Uptown | Neighborhood bars, local clientele, variety | Less infrastructure for very large groups; requires active navigation |
| CBD Hotel Bars | Polished, reliable, large capacity | Expensive, homogenous |
The Magazine corridor is the highest-upside option for groups willing to navigate rather than follow a script.
The Route: Louisiana to Nashville
The crawl runs roughly two miles of Magazine Street from the lower Uptown neighborhood up through the Garden District edge and into the Uptown commercial core. The practical version for most groups is three to four stops over three to four hours, with movement by foot between them.
Starting point: Louisiana Avenue and Magazine
The Louisiana Avenue intersection marks the beginning of the serious bar corridor. Below Louisiana, Magazine runs through the Irish Channel and then into the Garden District shop district — those are different experiences, and worth a daytime visit, but not where this crawl begins.
At and above Louisiana, the street shifts to a mix of neighborhood restaurants, corner taverns, and the first of the sports bars that define the middle of the corridor. This is where the crawl starts.
The early stretch: Louisiana to Napoleon
The first dozen blocks north of Louisiana have the most casual energy. These are the bars that open early, that have regulars who know each other by name, and that represent what neighborhood drinking has looked like in New Orleans for generations.
Groups should spend their first stop here rather than pushing immediately to the more well-known spots further north. The bars in this stretch are typically lower-key, have outdoor or sidewalk space that helps with group size, and provide an easier entry point before the night picks up energy.
The sports bar cluster: Napoleon to Octavia
The middle section of the crawl concentrates the neighborhood sports bars that serve as living rooms for Uptown residents on game nights. These are not chain sports bars. They’re bars that happen to have multiple screens, that have been showing Saints games to the same crowd for twenty years, and that maintain the neighborhood sensibility even when they’re at capacity.
For groups with sports-adjacent energy, this is the anchor section of the crawl. Groups with members who want to watch a game alongside locals who care about the outcome will find it here.
The practical limitation: some of these spaces have hard capacity constraints. A group of twenty arriving together at a bar that seats forty on a game night has miscalculated. The move is to send three or four people in first to check capacity and energy, then bring the group in as individuals or pairs, not as a bloc.
The stretch through Uptown: Octavia to Nashville
The upper section of the crawl toward Nashville Avenue and the Riverbend becomes progressively more Tulane/Loyola student territory — younger energy, louder music in places, more late-night activity. Groups who want the night to pick up energy should move toward this end after the mid-corridor sports bar section.
Nashville Avenue marks the informal endpoint. From here, the group either reconvenes for a final round in the Riverbend area or catches the St. Charles streetcar back downtown.
The Dive Bar Corridor
The Magazine Street corridor above Louisiana has a density of genuine dive bars — not bars styled to look like dives, but bars that have been operating continuously for decades without renovation, without concept refreshes, and without an agenda beyond cold beer and an open door.
These spaces are not photo opportunities. They’re places where the jukebox matters, where the bartender knows the regulars, and where an out-of-town group that comes in respectfully and spends money is welcome without friction.
How to navigate a dive bar with a large group:
The single most important thing a large group can do in a dive bar is not take over the space. Walk in. Spread out. Drink. Talk to the people around you. Don’t move the furniture to create a group section. Don’t occupy every stool at the bar leaving nowhere for regulars to sit. The bars that have been here for decades stay good because the locals keep coming back — and the locals keep coming back because out-of-town groups don’t make them feel unwelcome in their own bar.
Groups that get this right almost always have good stories about the dive bar stretch. Groups that treat the dive bar as a set piece for their group experience usually don’t understand what they were in.
The Neighborhood Sports Bars
The Uptown neighborhood sports bars operate on a different principle than the dive bars. They’re designed for capacity — multiple screens, enough room to absorb a crowd, a kitchen in most cases, and the kind of layout that handles a high-energy game night without friction.
For large groups, the sports bar section of the Magazine crawl is often the most logistically comfortable stop: space to spread out, food to order, screens to watch if there’s a game, and enough noise cover that 20 people talking loudly doesn’t read as intrusive.
What to expect:
- Saints, LSU, and Tulane games draw the biggest crowds; non-game nights are considerably quieter
- Most have kitchens running until late; group food orders are standard
- Tabs run easier here than at cash-only dives; card readers are standard
- Happy hours on weekdays can make these the most cost-efficient part of the crawl
The Magazine Street Return
The return leg of this crawl is the part that most groups miss entirely.
Groups typically end the night at whatever bar they’re at, call rideshares from there, and scatter back to wherever they’re staying. The alternative — and it’s a better ending for groups who have the energy — is to walk back down Magazine toward the St. Charles streetcar stop and treat the return walk as a second act.
The return walk in the other direction, between 10pm and midnight, covers the same street with different eyes and different energy. Bars that were quiet at 7pm have filled in. The outdoor sidewalk tables are occupied. The kitchen that was setting up when you walked past is now in full service. You see more of the street, and the group does it together instead of breaking into rideshare pods.
The St. Charles streetcar runs late enough that it’s a viable return vehicle for groups that aren’t in a hurry. The ride back downtown through the Garden District and Magazine corridor is a slow, pleasant end to an evening.
If the group has energy after the streetcar return, Frenchmen Street is a natural final destination — it will be in full swing by midnight, and the contrast between Uptown’s neighborhood bars and Frenchmen’s music venues is one of the more compressed versions of understanding what New Orleans contains.
Movement Logistics for 20 People
The challenge of any bar crawl with twenty people is that twenty people don’t move as a unit. They move as clusters of two to five people who happen to be going to the same general location.
The Magazine crawl rewards accepting this. Don’t try to keep twenty people together at every bar. Set a next stop, communicate it clearly, and let people make their own way there. The people who want to finish their drinks take five more minutes. The people who are ready go. Everyone reconvenes at the next location.
The group chat is infrastructure. A dedicated chat for the night out — not the general trip chat — lets people communicate split movements, find each other at crowded bars, and coordinate the transition to the next stop without someone having to physically round everyone up.
Set a time, not a consensus. The question “does everyone want to move?” produces fifteen minutes of debate followed by one person going to the bathroom and the whole thing starting over. The question “we’re moving to X at 10:30” produces movement. Whoever’s the trip organizer for the evening owns the timing.
Pro Tips
-
Start earlier than you think. Groups that start this crawl at 9pm find the Uptown corridor at full mid-week activity. Groups that start at 11pm find it winding down. The Magazine strip peaks earlier than Bourbon or Frenchmen.
-
Eat on the strip, not before. The Magazine corridor has enough casual food options that making dinner part of the crawl is better than eating separately and then arriving already full. The mid-crawl dinner stop is what paces the evening.
-
Don’t come in too loud. The best neighborhood bars on this strip have their own energy. Let the bar’s energy set the register; don’t try to override it with the group’s energy from outside.
-
The weekday version is often better. Magazine Street on a Tuesday or Wednesday night has lower tourist density, more locals, and better service than Friday or Saturday. If your trip includes a weekday, the Uptown crawl is the right activity for it.
-
Let sub-groups self-select at the dive bars. Some people in your group will love the dive bar stretch. Some will be ready to move quickly. Don’t force the whole group to spend equal time at every stop — the people who love it can stay and catch up.
-
Have the streetcar app ready. The St. Charles streetcar runs on a schedule that’s useful if you have it and confusing if you don’t. One person in the group should have the RTA tracker pulled up by 10pm.
-
The return walk is the underrated part. Budget fifteen minutes for it. Groups that do the return walk on Magazine instead of immediately ridesharing back almost always say afterward it was one of the better moments of the night.
Large Groups and Where to Stay
Groups doing the Magazine Street bar crawl are typically staying Uptown, in the Lower Garden District, or in the Bywater — which puts them well-positioned for an evening that ends in this neighborhood before returning.
The Syd, in the Lower Garden District, is a natural base for this crawl — it’s a short rideshare or walkable distance from the Louisiana Avenue starting point, and the return at the end of the night is straightforward.
Castleday Retreats, in the Bywater, is a longer return but works well for groups with the full evening structure in place — the Frenchmen Street extension after the streetcar return makes the longer return natural.