Canal Street, West Side, New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1904

About this postcard

A view along the west side of Canal Street in New Orleans, with open trolley cars of the Canal line running on tracks laid in the broad roadway while pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons and a mule cart share the street. The commercial blocks lining the avenue carry signs for businesses such as a tailor and a piano dealer, and overhead electric wires crisscross above the cars. Canal Street, laid out in 1807 as a wide dividing line between the old French Quarter and the American sector, became the city's principal shopping and streetcar thoroughfare, and this stretch shows it in the first decade of the twentieth century.