Canal Street at Godchaux's, New Orleans, 1907

The year is not a guess. It is printed into the negative itself, in a Detroit Publishing Company copyright cartouche in the lower left corner, beside the caption CANAL ST., NEW ORLEANS, LA. and the plate number 019937. The camera stands low and centered in the roadway of Canal Street, looking away from the Mississippi. Four sets of streetcar rail run toward the vanishing point, span wires cross the whole width of the street overhead, and three electric cars wait abreast in the middle ground with their trolley poles raised to the wire.

The street is full of people, and the plate holds them at glass negative resolution. A man in a three-piece suit and bowler stands alone in the foreground with his hands behind his back, looking toward the camera. About ten more men, most of them in bowlers, stand in the track between the cars, with a boy in a light jacket at the edge of the group. A woman in a long dark skirt crosses at the left. A one-horse dray waits at the corner while its driver stands at the horse's head. Every man in the frame wears a coat, and the shadows are short and hard, which suggests a cool, bright day rather than a New Orleans summer.

The three roof boards are the most precise dating evidence in the picture after the cartouche. They read ST. CHARLES BELT, PRYTANIA and ANNUNCIATION. The Prytania line ran through Canal Street and had been electrified in 1894, carrying uptown residents down from the Garden District to shop.⁶ The St. Charles and Tulane lines had run together as a belt service only since 1900.⁷ The Annunciation line was one of the city's older names, and its cars still worked Canal Street beside the newer belts. All three names appear on the same stretch of neutral ground in this frame, and only for a narrow span of years.

The car on the left can be identified. Its dash carries the number 181 twice, beside the headlight, under the ST. CHARLES BELT roof board. The surviving photographic record places car 181 on the St. Charles Belt, in a group of seventy cars numbered 160 to 229 that the American Car Company built in St. Louis in 1899 for the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, to a single-truck design drawn for New Orleans by the engineering firm Ford, Bacon and Davis.⁴⁵ A streetcar in a street photograph is usually anonymous. This one has a number, a builder, a birthplace, and a year.

The three cars are not three of a kind. By 1907 the fleet held several generations at once. The Prytania line's early electric cars were small Brills with mahogany interiors and rattan seats, though larger St. Louis-built Palace cars also ran under Prytania signs in these years, and the Annunciation line's first Brills had been replaced by Ford, Bacon and Davis cars in the late 1890s.⁴⁶ What stands abreast in this frame is the system's recent history, side by side on one stretch of neutral ground.

On the right, under a large ribbed metal canopy with the family name lettered across it, is Godchaux's. Leon Godchaux was a Jewish immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine who began as a river peddler carrying needles, thread and dry goods, opened a Canal Street store, and turned its profits into sugar plantations and mills.³ He founded his clothing business in the 1840s,⁸ and the fortune it built ran to a sugar operation of fourteen plantations at its height.⁹ He died in 1899, so this photograph shows the store eight years into its life without him.¹² The building in the frame was put up in 1892 by his descendants, who also widened the merchandise into women's clothing and household goods; the Historic New Orleans Collection records the address as 527 to 537 Canal Street.²

Around it, the block is a full commercial street rather than a single landmark. Signs legible on the plate include a cut-rate drugstore, a bookseller, an engraver and an outfitter, while the office windows opposite advertise attorneys, a coal merchant and a life insurance agency. This was the retail spine of the city. Canal Street's dry goods houses and clothiers had grown into department stores selling fabrics, hosiery, accessories, stationery, household furnishings and bric-a-brac, and by this period the Historic New Orleans Collection describes D. H. Holmes, further along the street, as the largest department store in the South.³ The streetcars in the foreground are what delivered the customers.

Beneath the paving there was another New Orleans being built, and it does not appear in the photograph at all. The city sits low, and its future depended on drainage. A drainage commission had been created in 1896 and the Sewerage and Water Board in 1899.¹¹ Sewer construction began in 1903, and the pumping stations were ready in 1906.¹¹ On the day this plate was exposed, the system was largely built and not yet fully in service; it entered full operation in February 1909.¹¹ Two cities sit in the same view. One is visible, made of canopies, rails and bowler hats. The other is buried, made of pipes and pumps, and it would decide how far the first one could grow.

The people in the track could not know how little time some of it had. The store behind them had less time on this corner than it looked. In 1923 Leon Godchaux Jr. agreed to move it up the street to 828 Canal, where it stayed until it closed in 1986.¹² The corner in this frame is the store's original downtown home.

That an ordinary day here was preserved at all is an accident of commerce. The Detroit Publishing Company photographed the street for the postcard trade, and its stock views outlived the trade that paid for them.

The plate is a Detroit Publishing Company glass negative held by the Library of Congress, and every detail you see is the original photograph.¹ Only the color is new. It is restored using modern professional digital techniques and transferred onto the original scan, so nothing is redrawn, sharpened, or invented. Our master is an uncropped scan, complete with the plate edge and the caption band.

Prints are available as premium luster posters, on canvas, and framed. Each 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., New Orleans, La.", https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016795057/
2. The Historic New Orleans Collection, "Godchaux's", https://vop.omeka.net/exhibits/show/goods-of-every-description/department-stores/godchauxs
3. The Historic New Orleans Collection, "Department Stores", https://hnoc.org/virtual-exhibitions/goods-every-description/department-stores
4. H. George Friedman Jr., "The Streetcars of New Orleans" research archive, Appendix III, http://friedman.cs.illinois.edu/app3/Page__c5.htm
5. Midcontinent Railway Museum, "American Car Company", https://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/american_carco.htm
6. New Orleans Historical, "Prytania Streetcar Line", https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/540
7. H. George Friedman Jr., "New Orleans Streetcar Album," University of Illinois, https://friedman.cs.illinois.edu/album/Album.htm
8. 64 Parishes, "Shopping Crossroads," Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, https://64parishes.org/shopping-crossroads
9. Friends of the Cabildo, "Researching the Sugar King of New Orleans," https://friendsofthecabildo.org/researching-the-sugar-king-of-new-orleans/
10. Scott P. Marler, The Merchants' Capital (Cambridge University Press), "Rural Merchants on the Cotton Frontier," https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/merchants-capital/rural-merchants-on-the-cotton-frontier
11. W. B. Behrman, "Brief History of Sewerage, Water and Drainage in New Orleans", https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Louisiana/New_Orleans/_Texts/Behrman*.html
12. The Times-Picayune archive via nola.com, "From early horrors to present day: The 121-year history of a Canal Street landmark", https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/from-early-horrors-to-present-day-the-121-year-history-of-a-canal-street-landmark/article_dd32ca64-6427-11ed-ac3a-d3b105315c42.html
13. James S. Zacharie, New Orleans Guide, 1902 edition, digitized by the Louisiana Anthology, https://louisiana-anthology.org/303_download/texts/zacharie--new_orleans_guide/zacharie--neworleansguidew00zach.pdf