I was interviewed for this article, and it came out pretty good!
The desire streetcars returns
Of course I had to buy it with a streetcar on the front!
Some photos from 18-May. I played tourist for a bit after flying in to teach a class that week in Santa Clara.
Cable car at the end of the line, Hyde St. and Embarcadero. This car has been turned around and is taking on passengers for the trip back up the hill.
The car above having grabbed the cable under the street and departed, the next of several cars on the other side of the Embarcadero crosses the street into the terminal. Cable cars are single-ended, so MUNI workers manually rotate the car on a turntable.
Trolleys on the F-Line - PCC 1056, Ex-Philadelphia, painted in Kansas City livery.
#737, ex-Brussels, painted in livery of Zurich, Switzerland.
Milan Tram 1811, in 1928 livery.
PCC 1010, in MUNI blue/gold livery.
PCC 1063, in Baltimore livery.
The world-famous sign.
Perley A. Thomas streetcar 962, running on the Riverfront segment of the Canal line.
A bit of an update as to what's going on with CanalStreetCar (dot com) and the New Orleans Street Railway Association.
First of all, welcome to everyone who has made their way here because they saw Angus Lind's piece in Da Paper! Thanks for stopping by, please join the CanalStreetCar (dot com) mailing list, which is returning to production this week.
It's been a wild beginning of 2008 for me personally. I've been traveling again, teaching computer classes for Hitachi Data Systems. (Take a look here for a description of the sort of stuff I teach.) Being out of town during the week for the classes has slowed down progress on developing the nonprofit, and the project is further behind than I'd like it to be. Still, I'm committed to getting it moving and we'll press forward.
If you've arrived here by going to nosra.org, you'll see that the regular NOSRA server is currently down. It suffered a hard disk failure and needs to be rebuilt. I plan on doing that in a week and a half when I'm home long enough to do that properly. Some links to photos in the NOSRA wiki won't work properly until that's repaired.
In the meantime, both sites will point here. I'll have more thoughts on where both CanalStreetCar and NOSRA are going on this site in the next few days.
In the wake of the storm, all of the Von Dullen streetcars have been stripped and are getting new paint jobs. This was 2012's turn in the paint shop. Carrollton Station has a full paint shop, which is one of the reasons I'd love to get NORTA a PCC streetcar or two. PCC streetcars could easily be painted to meet the needs of movie production companies that come to town to film.
All of the Von Dullens now look great, and we're waiting for BMC to get the first of the new propulsion units and trucks down here.
The end of the St. Charles Ave. streetcar line, at S. Carrollton and S. Claiborne Avenues. This photo is from June, 2002.
Six more weeks to go, and the St. Charles line will be 100% operational. As of now, the line is only running the length of St. Charles, turning around at Riverbend. NORTA has announced that they expect to finish the upgrades and repairs to the line on S. Carrollton Ave. by May.
The intersection of S. Carrollton and S. Claiborne Avenues has been the location of the end of the St. Charles line since belt service was discontinued in 1951. It is a double-track terminal with a double-slip switch. Several bus lines terminate either in front of Palmer Park (like the bus on the left side of the photo), or on the neutral ground on S. Claiborne (to the right, just out of the photo). This intersection has long been a transit hub, dating back to 1915, when the Orleans-Kenner Railroad began operations.
The streetcars in the photo are Perley A. Thomas cars 940 and 961, both vintage 1923-24.
Liberty Place, August 25, 1963 (photographer unknown). A single Perley A. Thomas streetcar on the Canal line sits on the three-track layover, having just looped around the monument. This was the final step in the evolution of streetcar operations at the foot of Canal Street prior to the conversion of the Canal line to buses. The Liberty Monument was removed from the foot of Canal St. in the 1980s by the administration of Mayor Sydney Barthelemy, antcipating the development of a downtown casino. The three-track layover was re-constructed when the Riverfront line was expanded in 1997-98. Instead of the loop, however, the current configuartion in this area is a turn from the Canal tracks to Riverfront.
Prior to the erection of the Liberty Monument in 1891, the Canal trackage turned off onto N. Peters, S. Peters, Decatur, and Fulton Sts., with a simple semi-circle loop at the ferry landing. Because of of the construction of the monument and changes because of electrification, the city hired the engineering firm of Ford, Bacon & Davis to re-design the trackage from in front of the Custom House to the ferry landing. FB&D developed and constructed a huge terminal that was eight tracks wide at one point, all coming together to the loop you see in the photo above. As streetcar operations declined in the mid-20th century, the terminal tracks shrunk to the final three.
The Liberty Monument has been a sore subject in New Orleans for decades. The monument commerates the "Battle of Liberty Place," which occurred on September 14, 1874. Frustrated by the reconstruction government in New Orleans, The White League (a white supremacist organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan) attacked the police and supporters of the government in the French Quarter and at the foot of Canal. The Republican governor, William Pitt Kellogg, was forced to leave the city until he could marshal federal troops to return to the Quarter, push out the White League, and restore order. Kellogg was a career Republican politician from Vermont who was appointed by Lincoln to administer the Port of New Orleans after the war. When local (white) politicians took over control of city government in 1881, the locals named the area at the foot of Canal "Liberty Place." the obelisk followed in 1891.
Originally, the monument was a commemoration of the White League's victory, and the names of the members of the League killed during the battle were carved on the obelisk. A parade was held annually on September 14 that ended at Liberty Place. In 1934, two plaques were added to the monument, directly recognizing white supremacy in the city and state. It was these plaques that added insult to injury for black citizens of New Orleans. In 1974, Mayor Moon Landrieu (father of Senator Mary and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, and now an appellate court judge) ordered a brass plaque erected near the monument explaining that the "battle" was actually an insurrection led by white supremacists.
Mayor Ernest N. "Dutch" Morial tried to remove the obelisk outright in 1981, as part of the preparations for the 1984 World's Fair, but was blocked by the majority-white City Council. While the council would not let Morial remove the monument, they did authorize him to cover up the 1934 plaques. Even though the City Council agreed with Sydney Barthelemy in 1988 that the monument should go, allies of white supremacist and KKK leader David Duke sued City Hall in federal court. The racists argued that the city's action violated federal regulations concerning historic landmarks. Both sides worked out a consent decree, and Mayor Marc Morial (Dutch's son) took the Liberty Monument out of storage and returned it to a location near the Riverfront streetcar line, a block away from its original spot.
Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue, looking lakebound, early 1880s. The church spire in the background on the right is Christ Church Episcopal, at Canal and Dauphine (the current location of the Maison Blanche Building-Ritz Carlton Hotel). The photographer is standing on the northern side of the big monument to Henry Clay in the middle of the intersection.
In the middle of the photo you can see three Stephenson single-ended "bobtail" streetcars. These cars were mule-powered (horses can't work for extended periods in the New Orleans summer). When they reached St. Charles Ave., the operators would turn them around on the turntable visible in the foreground. The man in shirtsleeves is most likely a street railway. working out of the little kisos to the left, behind the street vendor. That kiosk is a "starter house," where the employee working there would assist the operator in getting the mule and streetcar turned around for the outbound leg of the trip.
Four-track operations had already begun on Canal by this time. The two outside tracks were used by the streetcar lines coming to Canal Street from the Central Business District and Uptown (left side) and the French Quarter/Faubourg Marigny (right side). ; The center tracks were used by the Canal and West End lines.
Since the mule-powered streetcars are in the photo, and Christ Church is still located on Canal, this dates this photo to somewhere between 1880-1883.
Canal Street before streetcars! This is an illustration from an 1857 magazine, before the New Orleans City Railroad Company constructed their streetcar line along Canal from White St. to St. Charles Ave.
The original plan was indeed to construct a navigation canal down the middle of Canal St., which is why it is so wide. Had that plan been followed, Canal would look more like Ponchartrain and West End Blvds. looked before the New Basin Canal was filled in. Canal construction was more difficult than the original planners realized, so it was decided to build a canal that extended Bayou St. John to downtown rather than build a full river-to-lake canal. With the Carondelet Canal following a back-of-town route, Canal St. was poised to become the city's main boulevard.
This illustration shows the wide "neutral" ground between the Vieux Carre on the right and Faubourg Ste. Marie on the left. Since the Creoles and the Americans both needed a shopping district, the central location of Canal St. made it perfect for this role. The buildings along Canal at this time are no more than three or four stories high at this time. The church in the background is the original Christ Church. The Episcopal congregation was located on Canal until Isadore Newman bought the corner of Canal and Dauphine from them in 1883 and built his first Maison Blanche store.
Public transportation along Canal at this time was provided by "omnibus" carriages. These carriages were horse- and mule-powered.
An interurban electric car operated by the Orleans-Kenner Railroad, at the company's barn at Tulane Ave. and S. Dupre St. in 1928.
The O-K railroad ran from what is now Williams Blvd. and Jefferson Highway in Kenner to Canal and S. Rampart Streets downtown. The railroad followed Jefferson Highway to the parish line. When it crossed into Orleans Parish, the O-K ran down S. Claiborne, then turned left on S. Carrollton to follow the Tulane Belt path to Canal St. The return was via the St. Charles belt. The O-K ran from 1915 to 1929. NOPSI converted the St. Charles and Tulane Belts to wide gauge in 1929, making the track incompatible with the standard-gauge O-K. Buses were substituted for the interurbans, running from S. Carrollton and S. Claiborne.
One of the most significant differences between the interurban rail cars and traditional streetcars is the baggage compartment between the cab and rider seating. This area enabled farmers from Kenner to bring bushels of produce into town easily. Once at Canal and Rampart, it was an easy trip by wagon or truck to the French Market.
The O-K RR was the city's only true interurban line. Unlike other parts of the country, the geography of the Isle d'Orleans is such that it was too expensive to run electric interurbans through the swamp to higher ground. Connecting the tri-parish (Orleans/Jefferson/St. Bernard) to the rest of the world was the job of traditional railroad service.
We had a great discussion about the O-K Railroad at the East Jefferson Regional Library last week. I'll be posting more info about the O-K RR in the NOSRA wiki in the near future.
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