Canal Street from the Clay Monument, New Orleans, c. 1890

This view can no longer be made. The camera stands at the base of the Henry Clay monument, raised in the middle of Canal Street in 1860 and taken down in 1901; the statue stands today in Lafayette Square, and the vantage point went with it. The view looks away from the Mississippi River, up the broadest and busiest commercial avenue in the city. Canal Street was laid out along the line of a canal that was never dug, and its width is the space that was reserved for it.

The photograph dates itself, and the evidence is standing on the track. Three single-truck streetcars wait on the neutral ground, one behind the other. None of them carries a trolley pole, and no contact wire runs above the rails; the many wires overhead run pole to pole on crossarms, in the manner of telegraph and telephone lines. The cars themselves are best identified as bobtail mule cars of the type the John Stephenson Company of New York built for the city's street railways, compact one-man cars with a fare box in place of a conductor.⁶ Electric operation began in New Orleans on February 1, 1893, on the Carrollton and St. Charles line, and the conversions ran on through the decade.⁷ Unelectrified Canal Street track therefore places this plate in the last years of animal power, about 1890 to 1894.² The Library of Congress catalogs the item more loosely, as taken between 1880 and 1897, and the narrower range here rests on what the frame itself shows.¹

What reads at first as a boulevard is really a machine for moving people. By this period the neutral ground had become a street railway corridor carrying several parallel tracks, five or six of them along some stretches, while ordinary wheeled traffic used the two flanking roadways.³ Those roadways were paved with imported ballast blocks.³ Around the Clay monument the lines of several competing companies terminated, looped, or passed through, which called for turntables and starter's houses in the middle of the street.³ Sand or paving spoil is heaped along the right-hand gutter in this frame, which suggests work on that surface was under way when the shutter opened.

The block front on the right is a wall of signs, and much of the city's retail trade is somewhere in it. Canal Street was the principal shopping district, and its dry goods merchants were then expanding into department store retail; D. H. Holmes had held a large establishment on the street since 1849, and Godchaux's put up a new five-story store at Canal and Chartres in 1892.⁴ Music retail was unusually prominent here. Philip Werlein's house advertises twice within a single block front, once on a projecting fascia sign and once on a painted wall sign above it, and B. Fellman offers pianos and organs a few doors along. Werlein's and Grunewald's were among the city's major music stores and sheet music publishers of the period.⁵ Steinway lettering runs above the gallery, and a cloth banner hung inside it reads CHEAP DRY GOODS PALACE. A manufacturer of ladies' underwear, an importer, and a dry goods house at 127 and 129 share the same iron galleries.

The streetcar men had just won the shortest working day of their lives.

The people are ordinary and specific. Two women in full-length dark dresses with bustled skirts and elaborate hats cross the foreground. A bearded cab driver in a bowler sits on the box of a two-horse cab at the head of the carriage rank. A boy leans over the upper gallery rail above the Fellman sign. A delivery wagon at the right edge is lettered for a Canal Street ice cream and confectionery house. A utility pole at center carries a stencilled number and the words POST NO BILLS, and a poster board strapped to the lamp post on the neutral ground urges passers-by to go to Werlein's for the greatest bargains in pianos and organs. Advertising was already competing for every flat surface on the street.

The street had been unsettled for years before this exposure, and it was rebuilt soon after. In 1891 the Liberty Place Monument went up at the river end of Canal Street.³ On February 16, 1892, a fire crossed Bourbon Street and damaged or destroyed much of Touro Row, one of the street's important commercial blocks.⁹ In May 1892 the streetcar operators struck and won union recognition, a closed shop, and a working day cut from sixteen hours to twelve.⁸ That same year the New Orleans Traction Company took over the lines of the former New Orleans City and Crescent City railroads.³ Then the wires went up. The first electric cars ran in February 1893, the Prytania line was converted on September 15, 1894, the North Claiborne and Tulane lines followed in 1896, and the West End line took electric power in 1898.⁷

Nobody in the frame could see how quickly their own arrangements would come undone. The streetcar men had just won the shortest working day of their lives; by the end of 1892 the general strike that followed, involving somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand workers, ended in a settlement that dissolved their union's recognition.⁸ The cars they tended would be off the rails within a few years, animal power with them. The monument the photographer stood beneath was removed in 1901, and the exact view in this print became impossible to make again.

The print is made from the full-resolution scan of the original negative held by the Library of Congress, carefully restored in full color using modern professional digital techniques. Every detail is the original photograph. Only the color is new; nothing is redrawn, sharpened, or invented.

Prints are available as premium luster posters, on canvas, and framed. Each one is made to order, produced close to where it ships, and sent with tracking. Shipping is free in the United States and the European Union. The edition is small, the size is stated on this page, and it will not be reprinted. Questions are welcome at support@pastincolor.com.

Sources

1. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, "Canal St. [Street] from the Clay Monument," https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016817549/
2. Wikimedia Commons, "File:Canal Street From Clay Monument WM Jackson uncropped.jpg," https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canal_Street_From_Clay_Monument_WM_Jackson_uncropped.jpg
3. H. George Friedman Jr., "Canal Street: A Street Railway Spectacular," University of Illinois, https://friedman.cs.illinois.edu/canal/canal.htm
4. The Historic New Orleans Collection, "Department Stores," https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/goods-every-description/department-stores
5. The Historic New Orleans Collection, "Temple of Music," https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/goods-every-description/temple-music
6. Midcontinent Railway Museum, "John Stephenson Car Co.", https://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/stephenson2.htm
7. New Orleans Historical, "Prytania Streetcar Line," https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/540
8. New Orleans Historical, "1892 General Strike," https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/489
9. Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, "Touro Row, the Canal Street catalyst of the 1850s," https://prcno.org/touro-row-canal-street-catalyst-1850s/