Condé Nast Traveler's Storyville Museum Review

🎷 New Orleans Storyville Museum

Reviewed by Paul Oswell | Condé Nast Traveler | July 18, 2025

An enlightening educational resource that just happens to highlight the city's historic sex industry.

🔍 Zoom out. What’s This Place All About?

There are many angles that you can take into the exploration of New Orleans’ past—social, architectural, culinary—but this museum, opened in 2024, looks through a lens of vice. In the 19th and early 20th century, the infamous Storyville neighborhood (adjacent to the modern day French Quarter) flourished as a thriving red light district. The approach is far from lurid, and what owner (and long-time French Quarter resident) Claus Sadlier has assembled is a place that explores the city’s social, cultural and even musical history through a once-controversial, but nevertheless important part of its everyday life. Whether you’re interested in the origins of jazz, or the personal stories of the people that worked there at the time, it’s a new and refreshing addition to the historical interpretation of the Crescent City.

🖼️ A museum's permanent collection is its defining feature: How was this one?

Sadlier has nailed the aesthetics, which feel as high-end as any museum in town, and the museum is immediately immersive. Local artists have helped create a visually atmospheric journey that begins with the city’s founding and leads visitors through its evolution. The atmospherics of 19th- century brothels come alive, and the gritty detail of a life in sex work is explored through historical documents such as the Blue Book (a local directory of bordellos) to antique peep show machines and the like. It’s more encompassing, though, and the origins of gambling culture, the development of jazz and burlesque, and the culture surrounding absinthe are also explored. The incredible work of early-20th century photographer EJ Bellocq—who took striking portraits of many of the sex workers—is also featured.

👥 What did you make of the crowd?

Unlike “sex museums” in some other cities, this isn’t a nudge-nudge collection of sordid novelties, it’s an educational resource that just happens to highlight the historic sex industry. It’s easily accessible enough for the general visitor, and you’d have to be incredibly prudish to be offended by any of the exhibits. It’s not for a crowd seeking cheap titillation, it’s for people who want an insight into a side of local history that often gets neglected, but one that was the hub of so much of what evolved into New Orleans’ wider culture.

🛍️ Gift shop: obligatory, inspiring—or skip it?

There’s a tastefully curated gift shop, with everything from replica period playing cards and dice to give your game nights an extra touch of decadence, to vintage signing and decor, to copies of the famed Blue Book itself. Everything is high quality and mostly created by local artisans.

⏳ Any advice for the time- or attention-challenged?

You can easily have a surface-level experience in under an hour if you skip through the exhibits, which are arranged roughly chronologically. If the broader context of how Storyville came to exist through the socio-economics of the times doesn’t grab you, then you can blow through to the brothel-focused materials, but you’d be missing out on a hugely worthwhile and compelling story.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE