The Machine in the Garden District

When this photo on the cover and following page was taken in the spring of 1962 there was no other streetcar line in the world that ran through a setting as lush as St. Charles Avenue, and probably never had been. In most North American cities, this would have been called “private right-of-way” or “the median.” New Orleans Public Service Inc. (NOPSI) called it “neutral ground.” NOPSI had once operated thirty streetcar lines, but by 1962 there were only two remaining. The other one, running the length of Canal Street, would be shut down in 1964 and reborn forty years later, largely for the entertainment of tourists. By then the St. Charles trolleys had been running for 111 years, and the line had been enrolled in the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the History and Heritage Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

This NOPSI trolley, built in Philadelphia in 1922, was forty years old when the author snapped this photo on St. Charles Avenue. Nearly identical cars built in North Carolina remained a featured attraction in theme-park New Orleans until their long run was broken in August 2005. Other cities had rubber-tired tourist buses disguised as trolleys; New Orleans had the real thing.

Harper Charlton’s Street Railways of New Orleans was a harbinger of what is now an extensive literature on the history and heritage of the St. Charles line: on its origins as a steam railway during the 1830s, experiments with whimsical forms of motive power after the Civil War, electrification in 1893, the careful upkeep of rolling stock built in the early 1920s (of which the car in the photo is an example), and every aspect of its technology. But what catches the eye in this photo is the neutral ground. Along private rights-of-way one expects to see wooden ties and dirty gravel ballast—and often litter. Citizens living in the fine old homes lining St. Charles Avenue had had the political influence to ensure that its neutral ground harmonized with the Garden District and Uptown: azaleas, palms, well-tended fescue—the ambience of gentility.

But appearances are deceptive, and this scene was fraught with irony. After the institution of Jim Crow laws at the end of the nineteenth century, there had first been separate streetcars for whites and blacks in New Orleans. Then the city’s trolleys—on Canal, Carondolet, Claiborn, St. Claude, St. Charles, Dauphin, Dryades, Desire, and the rest—were outfitted with “race screens” that read “White Only” on one side and “Colored Only” on the other. These were inserted into brackets on the seatbacks and were movable. By law, any white person could transfer a race screen to any row of seats, as far back in the car as desired, no matter if this obliged African Americans to stand even when there were unoccupied seats in front. Over in Montgomery, Alabama, where public transit was provided exclusively by buses (as in all other Southern cities except New Orleans), Rosa Parks had kept her seat in the front of a bus on December 1, 1955 and had been arrested. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transit was illegal, but NOPSI did not comply. While they were never mentioned in any of the articles or landmark nominations that enumerate every component, every dimension, every material from which they were constructed, the New Orleans trolleys kept their race screens.

Even when the race screens vanished in 1959, similar segregation could still be found all over the city, at lunch counters, drinking fountains, and along the periphery of the Garden District. Tulane University, one of the busiest stops on the St. Charles line, was still an all-white institution when this photo was taken. In numerous ways, literal and figurative screens persisted for decades, and the tourists who flocked to the crescent of high ground along the levee from the French Quarter to Audubon Park remained mostly clueless about the way things were off the beaten track. Then came Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and all at once the whole world saw.

In 1962, Michael Harrington, in The Other America, had written that poverty was always off the beaten track. The urban poor were “increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else . . . the victims of the very inventions and machines that have provided a higher standard of living for the rest of society.” Katrina brought the underprivileged, as President Bush’s mother Barbara put it, back into sight. Not that there were no hurried attempts to erect screens. On September 15, when the president made a speech on Jackson Square, the New York Times reported that “image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets.” In mid-October, the president visited New Orleans again, and the press reported that he and Mrs. Bush “dined at a French Quarter restaurant before spending the night in a famed luxury hotel.” As I write at year’s end, the French Quarter is to the rest of New Orleans what the Green Zone is to the rest of Baghdad. People are buying beignets at Café du Monde, there is jazz on Bourbon Street, there are plans for Mardi Gras. But you don’t have to go far from the French Quarter to find the deserted and desolate streets looking the same as they did on September 15 when they were screened from the president, and when he pledged that “the streetcars will rumble down St. Charles, and the passionate soul of a great city will return.”

In December, two of the thirty-five St. Charles trolleys were towed over to the Riverfront line, the “ride” to the French Market that provided a surprise for delegates to the Republican National Convention that nominated George Bush pére. The Riverfront line is still operational, and the two cars were staged for a photo-op. But there are no trolleys on St. Charles. The poles that supported the wires are flattened and the substations ruined, and it will be a long time before any repairs, maybe more than a year.

The Riverfront, the French Quarter, the Garden District, the eighty-year-old streetcars on their neutral ground—these have comprised America’s most authentic theme park. To Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, the backdrop for George W. Bush’s podium on Jackson Square looked like an “eerie blue-hued castle at Disney World”—but, really, this part of New Orleans surpasses anything of Disney’s. And yet . . . if there are no trolleys on St. Charles Avenue, in theme-park New Orleans, what is to be said about parts of town that are on “the outskirts of hope,” as Lyndon Johnson once put it? It now seems clear that “repopulation” is unlikely, that most of the people who once lived in areas like the Ninth Ward will not return, any more than the Okies returned to the Dust Bowl. A good thing, probably, given the growing consensus that Craig Colten has it right when he says that most of the city “should not be put back on the real estate market.” They will be living somewhere, of course, a few of them in those storied FEMAville trailers—still off the beaten track, still feeling, as Susan Straight put it in the Nation’s “Katrina: Three Months Later” issue, “as if they are not, even now, citizens of this country.” As in the years of race screens.