2031 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130
Website, reservations here
- Opened in 1927, the Pontchartrain Hotel has lived several lives, including as an apartment hotel and senior living facility. In 2016, a renovation aimed to restore some of the mid-century swank that once attracted famous guests. Its bars and restaurants – totalling four – were also revived to appeal to locals who remembered the hotel’s glory days.
- Located outside the main tourist districts on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, the Pontchartrain offers a history-centered stay with seasonal appeal to budget travelers.
The history
A 2016 renovation produced the Pontchartrain Hotel experience available today, as well as an effusion of coverage in local publications of both that history and the specifics of the renovation. The rebirth headlines were driven in part by the place’s position in the hearts of the locals who made it a social hub during the middle decades of its life so far, as well as the boldface names – Cooper Manning and John Besh – who provided some of the vision for the refurb.
Manning, son of NFL veteran and New Orleans royalty Archie Manning, was an investor, working with Chicago-based AJ Capital Partners. Besh, at the time of the renovation, was one of the city’s superstar chefs and restaurateurs. (Besh’s status would change; Manning’s would, too, but for a different reason.) The project’s budget was reported at $10 million.
Manning was a friend of AJ Capital Partners founder Ben Weprin and played a key role in moving the company toward the project, wrote Ian McNulty in June 2016. “I told him about this old hotel around the corner from my parents’ house and started telling him stories about it,” Manning told McNulty. “That’s when we started looking at it. The idea of this being available was just irresistible.”
McNulty continued: “(Manning) grew up five blocks away on First Street, in the Garden District home where his parents Olivia and Archie Manning still live. The Pontchartrain Hotel was a frequent destination for family meals at the holidays, or when the Mannings’ old friends from Mississippi were visiting. Then there were some not-so-joyous occasions, especially when his father was quarterback for the largely futile Saints in the 1970s.”
So, the renovation was intended to rekindle memories among locals of a specific era in the hotel’s history, one that preceded the 1966 arrival of the Saints (see below) and paralleled the largely futile Saints decades that followed. By the time the city’s NFL team became perennial contenders, the Pontchartrain had been converted into apartment housing for seniors.
The property
Originally intended for a different location (adjoining what is now the Orpheum Theater), the project paused when developer Albert Aschaffenburg died. E. Lysle Aschaffenburg, one of Albert’s sons, revived the concept and moved it upriver. The 12-story “apartment hotel” and its modern amenities for 1927 – including elevators, maid service, telephones — were not immediately embraced by locals. The Depression happened shortly, too, and a rebranding came. “Apartment” was removed from the Pontchartrain’s title and the Caribbean Room was established as its flagship restaurant. And, in 1946, the Bayou Bar was established as its flagship watering hole.
A few rooms were held out as apartments. One indicator of the property’s one-time swank was that one of the apartments – actually three fifth-floor rooms joined into a suite – was once occupied by Edith Stern, an heir to the Sears department store fortune who married local businessman Edgar Stern and with him built two mansions that now make up the structures at Longue Vue House and Gardens.
The rebranding landed with locals, who made the hotel’s restaurant and bar favorites for private affairs and steady patronage – for decades, and those are the decades its current incarnation is intended to recall. The place’s appeal among its neighbors means that today’s tourists may get to meet a few, a rare experience for visitors to the city whose interactions with locals are usually limited to hospitality workers, tour guides, entertainers, and arresting officers.
Guest experience
Maybe it’s the Jim Morrison connection (see below), but the Pontchartrain Hotel felt like New Orleans’s version of Chateau Marmont during my two-night visit in September 2025. The two hotels are rough contemporaries in age, local esteem, and legend. “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont,” said Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia Pictures, advising young potential troublemaking stars William Holden and Glenn Ford.
The potential to make trouble on the level of a Jim Morrison or even a Glenn Ford isn’t the tangible vibe at the Pontchartrain, although Hot Tin, the penthouse bar with a title nod to one-time transient resident Tennessee Williams, could be. The low lighting level inside and a twinkly view of the city’s skyline outside would set a cinematic mood for a furtive assignation, or perhaps the simulation of one if vacation spice is a committed couple’s goal.
My room, entered via key and not a swipe card, struck me as a nod to the Pontchartrain’s years as a residential hotel. The furniture and artwork on the walls felt accumulated and not a big-lot corporate buy. The bathroom had a sealed medicine cabinet display of antique remedies. There was no traditional coffee maker but an electric teapot and teabags filled with ground coffee, a caffeine-delivery mode I’d never experienced before and judged OK, especially after I noticed that some residue in my cup somehow organized itself into a fleur-de-lis. The chandelier over the bed was operated by dimmer switch. The wi-fi, the most important of all amenities, worked.
There is no gym on-site but the guest amenity fee includes the use of Franco’s, a gym on Magazine Street that’s about a 10-minute walk away. Parking is by valet (listed online as $55 a night, which is close to market price; confirm when you check in) and the text-ahead system worked great during my stay, including one morning for a 5 a.m. departure.
There is no pool, but there is this: A big rainstorm flooded surrounding streets in May 1978, and some water made its way across the front sidewalk and into the lobby just as opera star Luciano Pavarotti (one of many boldfaces who’ve stayed there) was making his way from the hotel to the airport to make a singing engagement in another city. “When he came downstairs, he took off his shoes, rolled his pants legs to mid-calf and stood there in the water and started singing, arms outstretched,” Nell Carmichael, sales director, told McNulty in 2016.
Food and drinks
The Silver Whistle Cafe, now the hotel’s breakfast room, was once renowned as a see-and-be-seen hangout for early-rising local politicos, businessmen, and their lawyers. During my stay, it opened daily at 7 a.m. An early-coffee-needer, I asked a lobby staffer for some help and was referred to Aquila Bistro, open at 6 a.m. just a block away. Coffee and breakfast there was excellent, as was every staff member I encountered at the hotel. Memo to your inner Cliff Clavin: The Silver Whistle has had several incarnations but was originally named (and then renamed during the renovation) for a Broadway comedy from the late 1940s starring Jose Ferrer, once a hotel guest.
The 2016 renovation also reopened the Caribbean Room, waking up echoes of fancy meals of decades past and murmurs of the names of those who served them (chefs Nathanial Burton and Louis Evans, and decades-tenured maitre d’ Douglas Leman). That revival only lasted a couple of years. The Jack Rose restaurant today is fancy, too, but without mining much nostalgia. There’s an atrium feel to the main dining room, which was not too loud for a peaceful early dinner. I had the whole roasted Gulf fish (pricey, but I’d order it again). I did not have the much-beloved-by-locals Mile High Pie but was sure to get a picture of Ashley Longshore’s portrait of Lil Wayne, the Jose Ferrer of his day, enjoying a slice in the restaurant’s anteroom. My dinner check was delivered inside a copy of Cookbook of the Seven Seas. On another night, I crossed Josephine Street to Mr. John’s Steakhouse, another place where tourists can mingle with locals. There are dozens of world-class restaurants within a few minutes of the Pontchartrain, but don’t overlook Jack Rose or Mr. John’s.
I did have the specialty of the house at the Bayou Bar, by which I mean a pre-dinner martini. The bar features live jazz most nights and a pub-food menu that I didn’t try. A burger and some chicken wings floated past me at the end of the bar and looked great, but I had a whole roasted Gulf fish in my future. Another Cliff Note: The Bayou Bar was preceded in its space by the Halson Stable, a Western-themed joint serving such liquid fare as the Bovine Flip and The Stable-izer. Per this Mike Scott story from 2024: “Oil lamps, saddles and riding tack adorned the walls, like an early Cracker Barrel. Live chickens roamed among patrons’ seats, which were upholstered with Purina feed sacks.”
I’ve already mentioned what’s distinctive about the Hot Tin rooftop bar, added at the time of the 2016 renovation. The drinks are probably fine, but it’s the shadows-and-silhouettes interior and glowing exterior views that make it a destination, if only for just a peek.
Location
The Pontchartrain is located directly on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, a ride on which is a kind of museum experience in itself. The Ogden/WWII/CAC/Civil War museum district is just a few minutes away via this beloved rattling conveyance. The French Quarter and its wealth of history museums and great house museums is just a bit farther. Transfer at Canal to other streetcar lines that can take you to the New Orleans Museum of Art in one direction and the New Orleans Jazz Museum in the other. A long weekend of museumgoing via streetcar with the Pontchartrain as a place to crash and renew could make for a most splendid long weekend. Conventioneers should know that the far downriver main entrance to the Morial Convention Center is a 30-minute walk.
Doorstep streetcar access isn’t the only thing to notice at the entrance. The Nieux party venue directly across St. Charles from the Pontchartrain is a curiosity in that it’s made from components of the original restaurant of Paris’s Eiffel Tower. Next door to it are the offices of New Orleans & Co., the city’s tourism industry sales-and-marketing entity. The handsome online “Discover New Orleans” blog posts and listings at neworleans.com are essential research material for planning your visit. The ground floor of the Carol Condominiums, a block upriver, was the location of one of chef Janet’s restaurants in the HBO series Treme, and is now occupied by the Poseidon restaurant.
And, look up. The beads in the trees across the streetcar tracks signal that the Pontchartrain is on the main Carnival route every year for the two weeks of parading season.
Website
The site is comprehensive, beautiful, and a little sly: A page I somehow found outside the drop-down navigation tools described the Pontchartrain’s guest rooms as “anything but standard,” and some recent online reviews agree. In places, the decade that’s passed since the last renovation shows. And even back then, it was intentionally remade to capture “a new old-fashioned feel,” wrote Christy Lorio in 2016. “Think nouveau granny chic meets mid-century modern.”
For the record, as a museumgoer, I liked my room for what it was, not what it wasn’t. Also for the record, New Orleans & Co. sponsored my room nights.
On the website, room tiers are organized by the names Erato, Clio, Calliope, and the like – familiar to students of Greek mythology as the hot babes who inspire artists, familiar to New Orleanians as the streets on the Uptown route that roll past a few blocks after parades have passed the hotel.
Package deals offered there include one with comped parking and one with a weekday Bayou Bar special of two Sazeracs and late checkout the next morning. My room, a Clio King, listed at $118 for the nights I was there.
Extra things
- The Pontchartrain was, on All Saints Day 1966, the location where the National Football League announced that New Orleans would be joining the league. The team’s name would be the Saints.
- In December 1970, after a dreadful concert at the nearby (and equally legendary) Warehouse concert venue, three members of The Doors decided in a drizzling rain on the Pontchartrain’s sidewalk that Jim Morrison’s desultory performance that night would mark the group’s final concert as a touring quartet. Wrote drummer John Densmore in his 1991 memoir of Morrison and the band: “Three pallbearers, standing in the rain, had just put our live act in the ground. Finally.” Morrison was put in the ground in Paris a few months later. His connection to the hotel is memorialized by a signature cocktail, the Morrison Mule (made with bourbon not vodka), in the Bayou Bar. Pour one out for everybody who paid for the concert.
- There is talk of ghosts.