This 20-acre park along the river serves as promenade and public art gallery, with numerous works by popular local and internationally known artists amid green lawns and hundreds of trees. Seek out the kinetic Holocaust memorial sculpture by noted Israeli sculptor Yaacov Agam, and make a slow circle around it to get the full impact of its changing perspectives, which use a rainbow to unexpected symbolic effect. At the upriver end, you're rewarded with a splash fountain for a soggy cool-doown. An excellent incentive to get kids to take a scenic walk.

It connects to the nearby Moonwalk, a paved pedestrian thoroughfare along the river, a wonderful walk on a pretty New Orleans day but really a must-do for any weather other than pouring rain. Newly renovated, it has steps that allow you to get right down to Old Muddy—on foggy nights, you feel as if you are floating above the water. There are many benches from which to view the city’s busy port—perhaps while enjoying sugar-dusted beignets to a street musician’s song, or watching the moon rise over the river. To your right is the Greater New Orleans Bridge and the World Trade Center of New Orleans skyscraper as well as the Toulouse Street wharf, the departure point for excursion steamboats. All of the French Quarter's riverfront walkways and greenways will soon be renovated and connected in a contiguous path, meeting up with Crescent Park where the Quarter borders the Faubourg Marigny.