The floats of Rex, turning from Royal Street in the French Quarter onto Canal Street, around 1896. The photo is undated, but the statue on the left narrows down the possible time frame from 1895 to 1901.
The statue is of statesman, US Senator, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of State, Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay died in 1852, and a civic group began raising funds to erect a statue in his honor in downtown New Orleans. The base of the statue was huge. If you look at the photo, you'll see two mules in the bottom left corner. The base of the statue extended to where those mules are.
When the New Orleans City Railroad Company brought streetcar service to Canal Street in 1861, the Clay statue became a roundabout in the middle of the intersection of Canal and Royal (or Canal and St. Charles Avenue, as the street is called on the "American" side of Canal St.) The tracks around the statue became more and more complex as other operating companies added their tracks to Canal Street. Most of the lines were able to totally bypass Clay, though, since all they were interested in was to get to Canal, discharge passengers, pick up outbound riders, then head away from downtown. This only required being on Canal St. for a block or two.
Electrification changed the dynamics of streetcar tracks. Constructing the overhead wiring to keep the roundabout configuration of the track would have been too complicated, and a bit dangerous. The City Council decided that the elaborate base of the Clay statue should be cut down so electric streetcars could pass on either side. That's what you see in the photo. The motormen were still unhappy with the clearance they had with the statue, so the city moved it from the middle of Canal St. to Lafayette Square, between St. Charles Ave. and Camp St. Lafayette Square is directly across from what is now Gallier Hall, which was City Hall until the 1950s.
But let's get back to the parade! The only day parade at this time was Rex, King of Carnival, so this is a Fat Tuesday photo. The street in the background is Rue Royal. Parades started in the French Quarter, exited the Quarter onto Canal at Royal, then continued lakebound on Canal, usually to Rampart. They turned onto N. Rampart, then worked their way back into the Quarter, where they would end at the French Opera House. Parades continued to roll through the Quarter until the 1960s, when the city decided that crowds were getting just too big, and parades were a threat to fire protection in the area. The parades then moved to Uptown routes, so they entered Canal Street from essentially where those two mules on the left side of the photo are.
Notice how all the men are up front, crowding in to get a better view of the floats. The women who came out to the parade appear to be hanging in the back, a sign of the times.
The streetcar in the right foreground is a Brill single-truck model. The first electric streetcars had a single "truck" or set of wheels. As service expanded, the operating companies purchased larger, double-truck streetcars, and the single-truck cars were used on lighter-traffic lines and as service vehicles.
The small octaganol building in the right foreground is called a "starter's house." When using mule-powered streetcars, the operating companies put up these small buildings at the end of their lines and stationed an employee there to assist the streetcar operator with getting the car turned around on a turntable and started on their outbound trip. Since that starter's house is still there, that dates the photo even narrower, to 1895-1896.
UPDATE: Two weeks ago, we did a Feature Photo that showed a 400-series Perley A. Thomas streetcar on St. Charles Avenue during a Carnival parade. I wondered in the commentary why the floats were passing on both sides of the streetcar. An astute reader (I won't mention names since I didn't get permission) gave me the answer. In the 1920s-1930s, the "dens" (warehouses where the floats were constructed and stored) for many of the krewes were down by the river, at Jackson and Tchoupitoulas. They would parade up Jackson, then turn Uptown on St. Charles, go to Napoleon, where they'd turn around to head to Canal St. So, that photo was shot between Jackson and Napoleon.
