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.
Recently in Administrivia Category
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.
I'm off to Loyola's bookstore, to participate in a book signing with several other authors.
I'll be the fat guy in the green stretcar shirt. :-)
I've got a review of Bayou Coffee House on YatCuisine, and an article on New Orleans Public Schools on YatPundit.
I didn't want to put a lot of personal stuff in the weekly streetcar newsletter, mainly because it's got a high circulation. Still, I thought an explanation of why I stopped producing the newsletter last February and am returning to it now warranted an explanation.
This hasn't been the easiest of years for any of us, to say the least. When I was producing the newsletter, I was trying to figure out how to resurrect my computer training business in a world where everyone was more concerned about remediating mold in their houses. About that time, I got an offer to do training for two companies, Hitachi Data Systems and EMC Corporation. The stuff I teach is on the high-end side (local and remote replication on large-frame storage systems). It's not the kind of stuff I can teach to folks who live in metro New Orleans, for a number of reasons. That meant I had to go on the road between two and four months a week. While that was great for our household income, it meant I wasn't around the area to take pictures and such. The sad part of that dilemma was that there was so little progress in terms of the restoration of the streetcar lines that it was difficult to come up come up with things to talk about.
The lack of progress really did a number on me. You see, I was more of a bus kid than a streetcar kid growing up. Carter-Lake Vista-Lakeshore-Veterans. That was my way home from Brother Martin High School to Metairie. Either that or Broad-Canal-Veterans. Driving through Lakeview and Gentilly to bring my boy to school each day last spring was painful. Seeing the amount of destruction in Gentilly just broke my heart. While the whining of hardcore Republican residents of Lakeview about how the Bush administration was screwing them was bittersweet irony, it still broke my heart to see the non-existent recovery of both neighborhoods.
So, I did my best to separate myself from the nightmare, and that's why the newsletter went on hiatus. The return of control of Congress to the Democrats is encouraging for New Orleans, in spite of the side show that is William Jefferson. Combine that with finally shaking off most of my post-storm funk and it's time to get back to business. Oh, and there's the story about the restaurants that my friiends and I bought in Metairie and Kenner in 2006, but we'll get there... :-)
And so we shall.
In case anyone's been wondering what happened to all my YatPundit projects, I've been extremely busy of late. I was contacted by a training provider who contracts with EMC Corporation about doing some training for them. I did a bit of work for EMC up until about 2003, when a lot of my travel-training gigs dried up in the face of the Bush recession. A combination of circumstances has improved the training picture, so I've got the opportunity to do a bit more of this work.
Well, when you've been out of practice on a subject for a couple of years, it takes a bit of time to get the act back together, and that's what I've been doing for the last few weeks. Last week, I was in Dallas, this week, McLean, VA, and the week after next, I'll be in Milford, MA, doing EMC training work. Now that I've ramped up on the course material once again, I can resume my various on-line projects.
I know y'all understand when work and career intrude upon blogging and podcasting, and I appreciate your support.
Happy New Year! I was at K-Mart in Metairie yesterday, and when I got back to the car, an elderly gentleman was waiting in between his car and mine for his family to come out of the store. I told him good morning, and he replied by saying "Happy New Year." I thanked him, wished him the same, and said "It can only get better than the one we're leaving." He replied "God willing, I'm sure you're right."
We're determined to make 2006 a better year for this newsletter as well, by expanding our coverage and presentation from Canal Street to all streetcars in the city, past and present. The name of the website and newsletter will stay the same, but we're going green as well as red now.
In addition to expanding the website's coverage, we're starting to add more photos to the website during the week. Since CanalStreetCar (dot com) was converted to using the Movable Type publishing platform, it's easier to add new articles. Over the last couple of years, we've collected a number of image files of streetcars that were either too small for print publication or for presentation as weekly features. We're going to start adding these to the website, so check there for some interesting streetcar stuff.
Trains! Since this newsletter and our website deal with the city's street railways, we decided to re-activate the website that started it all for us, Virtually New Orleans, to present images and stories that go beyond the scope of the streetcars (this site) or the cemeteries. (www.citiesofthedead.net). The site is www.vno.us. The regular weekly feature on VNO is "Train Thursday," where we're presenting images of New Orleans-related train stuff. The first two articles in this series were on the Crescent Limited and Panama Limited passenger trains.
Yats! My younger son, Kevin, has become quite the fan of Benny Grunch. He insisted we buy him Benny's new CD (which features the new song "A Tale of Two Cities,") and he's driving us all crazy singing "O Little Town of Destrehan." Well, last week, while recovering from Christmas dinner, I put together two posts for the first two "days of Christmas." They were so well-received on various forums that I've kept it up. Today is the 7th Yat of Christmas, which is the "17th Street Canal" in Benny's song. If you want to see the first seven and follow along until Twelfth Night, check out YatCuisine, my food blog for the "12 Yats of Christmas."
Still adding things here to the MovableType configuration, please bear with me.
I'm in the process of converting the website to Movable Type, please bear with me.
