I Thought I Knew What Neighborhood I Lived In. In Fact, I Was Sure. Until I Wasn't.
- Elisa Cool Murphy
- Jul 22
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 22
We start every Behind the Shutters tour with one question.
"What do you call this place?"
It sounds simple enough until you actually try to answer it.
I've lived here for ten years. I served on the board of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association. I've helped clients navigate the Assessor's Office, the Historic District Landmarks Commission, the Architectural Review Committee and City Planning. I've voted here, spent more time than I'd care to admit looking at old neighborhood maps, and, by most reasonable standards, thought I knew exactly where I lived.
Then I started comparing the maps.
The funny thing about New Orleans is that certainty doesn't usually survive curiosity.
Ask seven maps where the Marigny ends and the Bywater begins and you'll probably get five—or eight—different answers. Residents disagree. Government agencies disagree. Historic district boundaries overlap. Even people living on the same block will confidently tell you they live in different neighborhoods, and depending on what they're referencing, they may all be right.
Of course it's complicated. When is New Orleans not layered?
At some point I realized I had stopped asking where one neighborhood ended and another began.
I had started asking a different question.
What is this place?
I have a home listed here.
One of the interesting things about selling a home in the neighborhood where you live is that you don't just hear what people think about the house. You hear what they think about the place. You begin collecting other people's interpretations of somewhere you've quietly taken for granted.
It's probably the closest I'll ever come to understanding what it feels like to be an artist hanging work in a gallery. You make something, step back, and quietly listen while strangers tell you what they think it means.
The comments weren't really about the house.
They were about the neighborhood.
"It feels a little industrial." "I'd rather be on a street like Mandeville." "I've always loved this block." "That steel house next door is my favorite house in New Orleans." "Is that an abandoned warehouse?" "No. That's the Krewe du Vieux den. There's probably a million dollars' worth of art in there."
None of those reactions were wrong.
They were simply different.
People weren't describing the neighborhood nearly as much as they were describing themselves. Their comfort. Their preferences. Their idea of what home feels like.
That struck me as important because I think real estate has a habit of sanding the edges off places like this. We flatten them. We try to make every block appeal to everybody, chasing the lowest common denominator because it feels safer.
But every block isn't for everybody.
It shouldn't be.
The mistake isn't that people have different preferences. The mistake is pretending those preferences don't exist. We market neighborhoods as though every buyer is looking for the same thing, when the reality is much more interesting than that.
So I stopped trying to explain this neighborhood.
I decided to let people experience it instead.
The home at 635 St. Ferdinand sits right where those conversations seem to become most interesting. It begins to tiptoe into a corridor that feels a little more industrial than the surrounding streets. The finishes are refined and thoughtful, leaning more contemporary than historic or reclaimed, and I expected that to become the focal point for many visitors.
It never did.
Even people who normally criticize contemporary finishes seemed to leave that opinion at the front door.
Instead, they lingered.
Again and again, visitors would walk in, slow down, stay longer than they expected, and tell us some version of the same thing.
"It just feels good in here."
There's a calmness that's difficult to communicate through photographs. You can describe it. You can stage it. You can photograph every room beautifully. But none of those things quite capture what happens when you're actually inside.
And then something clicked.
The couple who sold the home to my client were high-functioning creatives working in creative industries with a little rock-and-roll edge. I recognized that homeowner profile immediately because so many of my favorite neighbors fit that description. They're people doing ambitious, demanding work. They're surrounded by stimulation all day long. They're not looking for another project when they come home.
They're looking for peace.
But they're also deeply social.
They love opening their homes, introducing people, hosting conversations and building community. Suddenly I wasn't just seeing the house differently. I was seeing the people it seemed to attract.
It made me realize this home already knew how to bring people together.
It just needed people to experience it.
So we decided to create an experience.
The goal was simple: bring the outside in and see what happens.
If this house is at its best when people are gathered together—all kinds of people—why not invite the neighborhood inside? Why not let visitors experience both the calm of the home and the creation happening all around it at the same time?
When I started thinking about who to invite, my first instinct was artists.
But that category felt too narrow.
I kept coming back to another word.
Makers.
After all, these are my neighbors, my friends and my compatriots. They're the people I routinely find myself sitting beside at Petite Clouet. Some paint. Some write. Some build businesses. Some restore homes. Some cook. Some photograph. Some make music. Some connect people who otherwise never would have met.
Creation is bigger than art.
There's a line in Rent that I've loved for years: "The opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation."
I've thought about that line often, and the older I get, the more expansive it becomes. Creation includes painters, certainly, but also photographers, musicians, chefs, ceramicists, people making cocktails, people making community, people making conversations, people making introductions, people making solutions and people making opportunities for one another.
Whether I realized it consciously at the time or not, I think I've been carrying that idea with me for years.
Creation.
It was the one idea that wouldn't leave me alone.
And eventually it led me to do something I had promised myself I'd never do.
I named a neighborhood.
Well, a part of one.
A part of two, actually.
I gave a name to this no-man's-land—this every-man's-land—not because I thought it needed one, but because I needed a name for the experience I hoped people would have.
The Creative Corridor.
The Creative Corridor
I expected people to react poorly to a real estate agent naming any section of land.
After all, I'm still not sure we know what to do with East Riverside, Bunny Friend, or—I'm definitely not touching the debate over whether anything is "Lakeside of Saint Claude." I know better.
And I knew this behavior, coming from me, would surprise plenty of people.
To be fair, Realtors have earned a reputation for inventing neighborhoods, and most of them are a little like Crystal Pepsi. They don't make a damn bit of sense.
Every few years someone redraws a map, gives an area a catchy new name and hopes the market follows. Some get absorbed. Most don't. So it's understandable that people are skeptical when another one appears.
One friend wrote me privately.
"I thought you were one of the good guys..."
Fair enough.
But what I didn't expect—not by a long shot—was the enthusiasm for the event itself.
The videos took off. Hundreds of people engaged with them. They were shared far beyond our little corner of the city. People thanked us for organizing it. Others asked when we'd do another one.
Creative Corridor had always been the name of the experience.
It was never meant to replace a neighborhood.
It was simply a temporary invitation to look a little more closely at one.
And that's exactly what happened.
The Evening
The idea was wonderfully uncomplicated.
Bring a group of makers together inside a house that feels really good.
Stir.
See what happens.
As the date approached, my anxiety shifted dramatically. At first I worried no one would come. Then, as the RSVPs grew, I found myself worrying we'd created too much of a spectacle and I'd end up apologizing to the homeowner for turning their peaceful house into a circus.
Neither happened.
Something much better did.
People arrived in waves, never overwhelming the house, just filling it enough to give it a quiet energy. Tracy Popkin painted on the back deck while Pretty Rude Art transformed an upstairs bedroom into her studio for the evening. Chad Mo settled in downstairs, creating a new piece beside the old hearth. Sam Birdsong wandered through the rooms with his camera while photographs of the neighborhood streamed across the television, quietly reminding everyone that the evening wasn't just about the house. It was about the place surrounding it.
The Green Project joined us as our nonprofit partner, giving the evening another layer of purpose. This wasn't simply about opening a beautiful home. It was about celebrating creation while supporting an organization whose entire mission is built around giving existing materials a second life. There was something wonderfully fitting about that. A house designed to bring people together was now bringing together artists, neighbors, builders, preservationists and environmentalists under one roof.
Candy quietly stole the show with cocktails that somehow managed to feel every bit as thoughtful as the artwork surrounding them. There were cookies. There was tiramisu. Conversations drifted effortlessly from room to room. Strangers introduced themselves. Old friends ran into one another unexpectedly.
What struck me most was how naturally it all fit.
Nothing felt staged.
Nothing felt forced.
The house simply accepted all of it.
And then something happened that I hadn't anticipated.
I had gone into the evening hoping to gather makers together.
I hadn't expected to become one myself.
The evening produced exactly what we'd hoped for. Paintings were finished in real time. Music drifted through the rooms. Conversations wandered from architecture to preservation, from neighborhood history to favorite coffee shops. Artwork found new homes. Candy's cocktail pouches—quite possibly my newest vice—disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. Tiramisu was an absolute hit, as were the Makers cookies, which I suspect will become a regular feature at future events.
But somewhere in the middle of all that, something happened that none of us had planned.
An idea was made.
Through conversations between Desiree—who, in addition to being a Realtor with Cool Murphy, serves as President of The Green Project's Board—and several of the makers, we uncovered something unexpected. The application fee for Salvations, The Green Project's annual fundraising gala, wasn't really the obstacle. The obstacle was confusion. People misunderstood what the fee was, what it covered, and how the process worked.
So we did what we do best.
We made clarity out of confusion.
Salvations is one of my favorite evenings in New Orleans. Every year, The Green Project transforms the beautifully restored Capulet into a celebration of creative reuse. Makers create extraordinary work from reclaimed materials, and those pieces are auctioned with proceeds benefiting both the artist and The Green Project. Half supports the maker. Half supports an organization dedicated to keeping usable building materials out of our landfills while making them accessible to our community.
Everybody wins.
We proudly sponsored the event last year.
This year, we'll be sponsoring the application fees for five makers.
If that's you—or someone you know—we'd genuinely love to hear from you. Forward them this article or have them reach out to us at cool@coolmurphy.com. We'd be delighted to tell them more. We're excited to make this a tradition.
The evening created more than artwork.
I guess that's what happens when you stir creators of art together with creators of solutions.
You create opportunity.
By the end of the evening, I wasn't thinking much about neighborhood boundaries anymore.
I was thinking about houses.
The best ones don't simply shelter us.
They shape us.
Before the event, I quietly wondered whether some of the makers might walk into a home at this price point and feel like they didn't belong there. I worried the finishes or the price tag might create distance.
Instead, they created aspiration.
Chad Mo later sent me one of the most thoughtful messages I've received in a long time, thanking me for reminding him how much fun it is to create live in front of people again. Tracy left with new collectors and new clients. Pretty Rude Art laughed that she'd have to sell a lot more paintings if she wanted a house this calm one day.
No one seemed intimidated by it.
They seemed inspired by it.
It felt like goals.
Not gauche.
That distinction matters.
Long before my client owned this home, someone else invested the time and imagination to save it. The owners who followed filled it with friends, conversation and creativity. My client continued that tradition, telling me stories about neighbors from across the street, friends from across town and evenings where one conversation naturally turned into another.
The event didn't create that.
It revealed it.
All we really did was bring the outside in.
We brought makers into a house that already knew how to hold them.
Then we stirred the pot.
And this is what we got.
The evening left me thinking about the question we started with.
What do you call this place?
I still don't know that there's one right answer. The maps don't agree. The agencies don't agree. The neighbors certainly don't agree.
And maybe that's okay.
Maybe the blurred lines exist for a reason. Maybe a neighborhood isn't defined by what we call it.
Maybe it's defined by what we create together.
Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.
Contact Her -
email: cool@coolmurphy.com
Facebook: @homeinneworleans
IG: @coolmurphynola
YouTube: @coolmurphynola
phone: 504-321-3194
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