501 Basin Street, New Orleans LA 70112
Website, reservations here
- Located at a vortex of New Orleans history, The Brakeman Hotel offers budget-friendly accommodations for museumgoers looking for a great location, superb rooms, easy access to cemetery and bus tours, and a glory-days-of-railroading theme.
- Adjacent to both the French Quarter and historic Treme neighborhoods, the Brakeman also offers one of the best parking bargains in the city.
The history
Built in 1904, the structure on the upriver side of the property served as offices for the New Orleans Terminal Company and as a freight office for the Southern Railway. Unused since the mid-1970s, it was restored in the early 2000s by the family-run Valentino New Orleans Hotels group. The Valentinos added the downriver structure that serves as the entrance to the hotel and Basin St. Station, a visitors center with café, gift shop, and informational displays about Southern Railway history and other New Orleans museums and attractions, including the Historic New Orleans Collection, the National WWII Museum, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and others.
The addition to the visitor’s center, which opened in 2006, recalls the once-magnificent Southern Railway Terminal at Basin and Canal, designed by Daniel Burnham, completed in 1908, and demolished in 1956. The lines that fed the station rolled down what’s now the Basin Street neutral ground bordering the French Quarter and what was once Storyville, the city’s infamous red-light district from 1897 to 1917.
A full block long, the main terminal’s passenger platforms stretched two more blocks to Conti Street. If a rail passenger was seated on the lakeside of a car while inbound to the station, they’d have a terrific view of Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, Tom Anderson’s Arlington Annex Saloon, Josie Arlington’s, and others among the District’s more than 200 sporting houses.
The Southern Railway Terminal was a portal to a web of rail lines throughout the South connecting the region’s shipping, manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism industries. The terminal’s impact on the city, in the years before its multiple train stations were consolidated into the Union Passenger Terminal at the intersection of Calliope and Loyola in 1954, is remembered in the New Orleans Storyville Museum’s “Walking Tour of Storyville” exhibit as well as the guest-room wallpaper of the Q&C Hotel and Bar on Camp Street, repurposed from an office building that was constructed to serve as local administrative headquarters for the Queen & Crescent rail route, which connected Cincinnati, the Queen City, and New Orleans, the Crescent City. And, of course, at Basin St. Station.
The property
Learn about Basin St. Station’s railway roots in the first-level visitors’ center. Ephemera collected by Southern Railway enthusiast Harvey Wagar, including dining-car china, model trains, and a full-size replica of the nose of a 1920s steam engine, are on view. The lobby is fashioned as a facsimile of the Southern Railway terminal, with murals, dramatic chandeliers, and information desks approximating ticket counters. The railroad theme continues via artwork in the upstairs hallways.
It is at one of the lobby counters were passengers book rides on the Hop-on, Hop-off bus line that makes more than a dozen stops encircling the French Quarter with route extensions visiting Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue, as well as a couple of different walking tours. Find the “Tomb It May Concern” sign to book a walking tour of the next-door St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, future home of Nicolas Cage and the permanent address of many souls important to New Orleans history.
The Brakeman’s front desk, populated by staff 24/7, is also there. The Valentino-era renovation added a fourth-floor event space (with a spectacular view of the downtown New Orleans skyline) and commercial office space on the second and third levels. My only previous visit to the property was to interview Nick Spitzer, whose American Routes public radio show was once headquartered in the building. The 2022 renovation resulting in the Brakeman converted the office space to 18 hotel rooms.
Guest experience
The hotel’s front desk is directly to your left as you enter Basin St. Station past a vintage sign that says “Look out for the locomotive.” Crossing the lobby, visitors encounter a large-scale compass on the floor. Note that it correctly designates the key navigation directions as “upriver,” “downriver,” “riverside” and “lakeside.” An elevator and stairs across the room deliver guests upward to their rooms. A key point: Elevator and stairs access is by room key. Another door at each upward elevator landing requires key-card entry as well. Counting after-hours key-card access at the main entrance and your room’s door, there are four levels of security at the Brakeman. Some locals, especially those who recall the Iberville public-housing complex that replaced Storyville or the popular admonition to not stray too many blocks toward the lake from Bourbon, will advise against the location. They’re wrong. It’s great, and I felt perfectly safe there at all hours.
My accommodations for a two-night visit in November 2025 were a second-floor suite (two queen beds in a large bedroom, separate seating area, great downtown view), provided gratis by the Brakeman, as were my cemetery and bus tours. There is no pool, but guests have access to the pool at the nearby affiliated Hotel St. Marie.
The in-room experience was superlative – quiet, comfortable, and a boon to bargain-hunters. The Brakeman’s typical room prices, for value delivered, are one of the best deals in town. My room had a branded notepad, stationary, envelopes, and a pen – an amenity I don’t recall seeing in a hotel in decades, and a callback to the days when the likes of Tennessee Williams would dispatch correspondence to the world (and to history) on New Orleans hotel letterhead.
Food and drinks
The lobby’s Basin St. Cafe is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For earlier coffee, brew some in your room or cross Basin Street to the small canteen located inside the Chevron station there. There’s superlative Community Coffee served at all hours, as well as some breakfast foods and fried chicken, a gas-station staple throughout the city.
Nearest martini: If Jewel of the South is operating, that could be the solution, though the imaginative and often historic cocktails served up by the legendary Chris Hannah would be what you’d want to explore. If the Jewel is dark, hike another couple of blocks to the Hermes Bar at Antoine’s. A little closer, at 819 St. Louis, is B Mac’s French Quarter Bar and Courtyard, which manages to feel like a neighborhood bar while located just a few steps off rowdy Bourbon.
Location
The Brakeman is located at a vortex of New Orleans history, on the border between the French Quarter and the equally historic Treme neighborhood. A host of great museums are comfortably walkable from this location. On the Quarter side are historic house museums; the state-run Cabildo, Presbytere, and New Orleans Jazz museums; and the Historic New Orleans Collection. In Treme, there are the Backstreet Cultural Museum, the Petit Jazz Museum, and the New Orleans African American Museum.
Exit the hotel’s entrance and you’re looking at the Municipal Auditorium, shuttered and moldering since Katrina but once a space for Carnival balls and musical performances, Elvis Presley to Led Zeppelin. George Clinton’s Mothership made its first landing there. Hank Williams staged two public ticketed weddings there – one a matinee, one an evening ceremony – in October 1952, then soon died. Read more here. At the auditorium’s foot is Congo Square, the site of gatherings of the enslaved who were allowed to practice African rhythms and rites on Sundays. It is the domestic headwaters of what became jazz, blues, R&B, bounce, and more. More.
As noted already, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, dating to 1789, is next door to the hotel. Guided tours depart exclusively from Basin St. Station. More here and here.
Website
Packed with big, beautiful pictures of Basin St. Station, the Brakeman’s rooms, and a FAQ, the website is clean and informative, as are all of the sites for the Valentino properties. Tip: Find details there of a best-rate guarantee before booking through any other service.
Parking
This category is one of the Brakeman’s overwhelming assets for road-tripping musemgoers. Overnight self-parking for hotel guests is $20, less than half of what you’ll likely pay at other New Orleans hotels or public lots. Check at the desk, but I was allowed to leave my car in the lot several hours past check-out time while I did a museumgoing Quarter stomp. I’ll type it again: In addition to all of its other pluses – comfortable guest rooms, clever theming, Quarter-adjacent location – the parking sitch is primo.
Extra things
- If you’re unfamiliar with the story, don’t miss the interactive map inside Basin St. Station that demonstrates the extent of Hurricane Katrina flooding. Also don’t miss the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park display that contains a detailed explainer, with interactive sounds, about the history of the city’s marquee music. A toe-tapping jazz soundtrack plays all day at Basin St. Station.
- Take the cemetery tour, which features a little walking on uneven surfaces and some time in the sun, so pack a hat and watch your step. The stories of the site’s above-ground burial rites, tomb management, and historic preservation are all told in detail. There are too many notables to point them all out in one 55-minute tour, but the newly elevated residents of note are Joseph Aristide Baquie (d. 1882) and Therese Rancurel Baquie (d. 1857). He is Pope Leo XIV’s great-great grandfather. She is Joe’s mother and the pope’s great-great-great-grandmother. The story of Pope Leo’s local Creole ancestors is still being researched, and is an epic New Orleans – and American – story. More here and here.
- Take the bus tour, especially if it’s your first time in New Orleans and you’re intimidated by the specter of street crime (not much of a threat during daylight hours in the French Quarter), unsafe walking surfaces (a very real threat in the French Quarter if you’ve got an unstable gait, poor eyesight, or can’t hold your liquor), or olfactory funk (though at the time of this writing in November 2025 the Quarter was smelling mostly minty fresh; for most of its history it has not). My bus-tour guide hit most of the history highlights and also imparted a few quirky tidbits, such as why the street names change at Canal, what makes a poor boy “dressed,” and the difference between an exterior balcony and gallery.
- The Valentino group’s home site, which details all of its properties, is here.
