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December 26, 2004

Snow on Canal Street, 1963

It only seems fitting that we should have white stuff on the ground this winter. The last time the Canal Line operated in wintertime was in the winter of 1963-64, and that was a white one as well. Even when it snows in New Orleans, it never amounts to much, but the little bit that falls usually spells trouble for anyone trying to drive in the city.

Tuesday, December 31, 1963, was a nasty, gloomy day that was capped off with freezing rain and snow. The Streets department of city government doesn’t have the infrastructure set up to deal with ice and snow on the roads. There’s no point to it, considering it usually only happens once every ten or so years. So, when the white stuff comes down, things get complicated.

This photo was shot at the corner of Camp and Canal Streets. Four snow-dusted Perley Thomas streetcars are heading riverbound, waiting for their turn to loop around Liberty Place and head back to the Cemeteries. Two streetcars are on the outbound track on the other side of Magazine Street. A trolley bus on the Magazine Line is turning onto Canal from Camp for its one block appearance on Canal before turning back up Magazine Street and the outbound run. Just to the right of the trolley bus is the snow-covered sign of Waterburys Drugstore. The location is now part of the Sheraton Canal Street Hotel. The flower boxes that were constructed where the two outside streetcar tracks during the 1957-58 renovation of Canal Street are visible in the neutral ground. The Custom House looms in the background as it does in many photos of Canal Street.

The traffic heading towards the river is stacking up because the city closed the bridge that afternoon. That meant anyone trying to get to the West Bank had to take the ferry. It was a rough evening for commuters, but any inconvenience was balanced out by waking up to real snow and winter fun on New Year’s Day the next morning!

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 08:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 12, 2004

Mr. Bingle

Anyone who grew up in New Orleans in the late 50s through the 1960s should remember that little song. Mr. Bingle would make regular appearances on morning kids’ programs like Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo to encourage kids to get their parents to bring them downtown to see Santa and shop at Maison Blanche. (Mister Bingle = MB = Maison Blanche).

Who is Mister Bingle? He’s a little guy, a snowman with holly angel-wings, blue eyes, a big red nose, candy-striped gloves, and an ice cream cone for a hat. To kids he was a puppet who appeared each Christmas season on TV commercials, and was in the big displays at the main MB store on Canal and Dauphine in the CBD.

As we show you here a couple of weeks ago, the Maison Blanche department store was a fixture on Canal Street for a century. The building that now houses the Ritz-Carlton Hotel is familiar to most New Orleanians over 30 as the store where you could see Mr. Bingle in the front window at Christmas time. MB was a classic department store, with big picture windows on the ground floor. The toy department was up on the fifth floor of the store. Mr. Bingle was up there as well, in a walk-through display that led right up to where Santa sat. In the late 1980s, the window displays on the ground floor were a bit outdated, and MB brought out the giant Mr. Bingle you see in the photo each Christmas.

Maison Blanche has vanished from the retail landscape, having been bought out by Dillard’s in the late 1990s. Mister Bingle lives on, however, as a spokesman for Dillard’s. It’s just not the same, though, even though Dillard’s used to hang up the big Mr. Bingle on the side of their store at Lakeside Mall. Gone are the days when MB and D. H. Holmes were the Macy’s and Gimbel’s of New Orleans. Still, the memory of that little guy lives on. There’s even a novel, Saving Mr. Bingle, by Sean Doles, where he’s one of the main characters.

So, while you’re running through Target, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart, sitting in front of your PC ordering from the almost-unlimited retail choices on the Internet, take a look back to when you rode the streetcar downtown to see Mister Bingle in the window...

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 08:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2004

Carrollton Station

Carrollton Station is the oldest RTA facility in the city. Built in 1893 by the New Orleans & Carrollton R.R. Co., it has serviced streetcars, trolley buses, and diesel buses. Today, Carrollton Station is the main service and construction facility for all three of RTA’s streetcar lines. The barn is located between Willow and Jeanette Streets, from Dublin to Dante Streets.

This Earl Hampton photo shows three Von Dullen cars at various stages of assembly in 2003. The cars were built from scratch at Carrollton Station, in the shop building closer to Dante Street. After being painted, the cars were then moved to the maintenance tracks in the main barn, which is where they are in this photo. Car 2008 has its trolley poles installed, but the monitor deck and A/C unit are not yet in place on the roof.

Now that the Von Dullen cars are in service, their home is the A. Philip Randolph SIS facility on Canal Street. Carrollton Station now looks more like it did in the 1970s, when all it serviced was the St. Charles Line. All of the “red ladies” of the Canal and Riverfront lines call Canal Street their permanent home. The 2000- and 400-series cars do come back to Carrollton Station for overhauls and major repairs, though.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 08:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack