3610 Tulane Avenue, New Orleans LA 70119
Website, reservations
The history
An oldish-school midcentury motel on an unglamorous stretch of Tulane Avenue, the Iris Motel is an honorable reclamation that offers comfortable, budget-friendly accommodations for anyone looking for an offbeat adventure. Its roots were planted in 1960, and the property survived a few decades of decay. In 2013, the Times-Picayune newspaper located Sweet’s Inn, the Iris’s pre-reclamation incarnation, as a vortex of sex-work trade.
Tulane is speeding in transition toward a less-gritty future, with the Iris and the upper-scale Drifter (another rehabilitated motel now named the Maidstone New Orleans) leading the way in the hospitality sector.
The property
Given the property’s past and this stretch of Tulane’s reputation, the Iris’s marketing and website make good use of reassuring key words and phrases, including “clean,” “comfortable,” “premiere motel” and “step into southern style.” There is no business center or gym, but there is a tidy swimming pool, in-room coffeemakers, and mini-refrigerators. Also on-site parking, which is included in some room rates. But the place backs up everything its marketing promises, including the winking “premiere motel” coinage. Though news-sentient locals not born yesterday could never imagine someone staying here or anywhere near here, hardy travelers have and will continue to find excellent value at the Iris, with amenities (especially the parking) and a retro motor-hotel motif. There are many more costly hotel choices in New Orleans; the Iris’s quirky cool, great room rates, and Mid-City location set it apart.
Because of the Iris’s location in the dead-center of the Orleans Parish map, equally reasonable are ride-share fares to and from attractions in almost every direction (City Park, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Jazz Fest home Fair Grounds Race Course toward the lake; the French Quarter, CBD, and Uptown toward the river).
Visitor experience
I stayed at the Iris for two blistering-hot days in July 2025 during one of New Orleans’s worst tourist summers ever. So I had the pool, parking lot, and basically the whole place to myself. I noticed one other car in the lot during the time I was there. The excellent news is that my double-queen room’s air conditioning unit performed heroically. It was never less than perfectly cool inside. The second-floor rooms are only accessible by stairs. There is an accessible room on the first level.
My second-level room was tidy, pleasant, and comfortable – if maybe a little tight for, say, a family traveling with a couple of kids. The pool area was small but pristine, so there’s the bail-out plan for the welps. There are plenty of chain fast-food outlets with drive-thru service on nearby Carrollton for early morning or end-of-day provisioning. Finn McCool’s Irish Pub, a local neighborhood favorite, is a nine-minute drive for drinks and pub food (good wings and corned beef, among other choices). Lighter fare minus the rugby-den decor is available a couple of minutes further at Mona’s Café, also a neighborhood favorite. The city’s one-and-only Costco is a seven-minute drive. Club members with kids know why I’d note that. A couple of grocery stores are even closer, but in the opposite direction. A new Trader Joe’s is not quite walkable but a five-minute drive.
The view from the rooms isn’t exactly Maui or even Grand Isle. Directly adjacent is an office building for the local gas-and-electric utility, Entergy. Leave town when they roll down the heavyweight window shutters. Upriver (left as you stand outside your room) there’s a view of (and audio wash from) the always-busy Pontchartrain Expressway as well as the tops of a few buildings on the Xavier University of Louisiana campus. Given the road noise all around (Tulane Avenue can get busy during drive times), I found the room to be quiet enough for successful mid-afternoon naps and two full nights’ sleep.
Though mostly alone on the property, I never felt unsafe. Parking and room entrance are by code pad, emailed to guests before their scheduled arrival. There are heavy automated gates between the rooms and street. It’s worth repeating: The Iris never felt unsafe to me. The Sweet’s Inn days appear to be done.
Website
The site captures the vibe and features accurate photos of the different room types. There’s also a comprehensive FAQ page.
Extra thing
The Iris sits near one end of Highway 61, celebrated – including by Bob Dylan – as one of America’s most history- and culture-rich byways.
Take a left (or actually a right and then a cautious U-turn) out of the motel’s parking lot and you’re riding, eventually, into music history. Ride far enough and you can take a left off of Interstate-35 (which supplants Highway 61 as the route’s designation for a bit) in Duluth, Minnesota, and find yourself at Dylan’s boyhood home, which still stands at 519 N. 3rd Avenue.
Take a right and keep going the few blocks until Tulane Avenue (as Highway 61 is known to city mapmakers) runs out and then take a left and you’ll be headed down Rampart Street and past Congo Square and 838-840 Rampart, once J&M Studio, most recently a laundromat, and soon to be a place that better recognizes the site’s importance. Both are ground-zero destinations for anyone interested in American popular culture.
Winding with the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minnesota, Highway 61 passes (or passes near) landmark music museums in Leland, Clarksdale, and Cleveland, Mississippi.
While navigating Clarksdale, you’ll pass through the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 – the “crossroads” where Robert Johnson was said to have swapped his soul for supernatural guitar prowess. While navigating Metairie (slightly closer to town), you’ll pass the former site of the Travel Inn (a historical contemporary of the Iris) where in the late 1980s the recently deceased TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart swapped cash with a sex worker to observe her performing lewd acts.
Dubbed Airline Highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Highway 61 got extra attention from Huey P. Long’s roadbuilding program, reducing a day’s drive between Baton Rouge, the state capitol, and New Orleans’s Roosevelt Hotel, Long’s satellite governor’s accommodations, into less than a two-hour jaunt. Long didn’t live to see its completion.
Elsewhere on its route north, Highway 61 passes through Mississippi River towns linked to another towering figure in American popular culture, Mark Twain. A left turn out of the Iris will eventually take you to Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s hometown and inspiration for his best-loved fiction.