Back on Track

originally published July 16, 2008

They're back. Those of you who aren't New Orleanians, or at least Louisianians, can't understand the significance of the return of the St. Charles streetcar line to the City of New Orleans. It's certainly not a significant event in the overall history of mankind, but to a city that has outlasted plagues, fires and hurricanes for almost 300 years now, it's a historical turning point. Once again, we have proven to ourselves that New Orleans is going to make it. Life will go on as usual for a city whose life as usual is not a usual life by most people's standards. But that's why people come here, even from Europe and Asia, to see our great city, taste the food and enjoy the music in the city where jazz was born.

On Sunday, June 22, at 3:53 a.m. (yes, we are a late-night people), the first street car left the Canal Street Station and traversed the entire route of the St. Charles line. The Canal Street line has been operating for some time, and the St. Charles line has been opened up piecemeal. But no longer. It will start at Canal Street (one of the world's great boulevards) and go up St. Charles and around Lee Circle (the Statue of Lee is facing north, still protecting us from the Yankees after all these years), past the great mansions and churches on St. Charles to the bend in the Mississippi where St. Charles ends, and then the streetcar makes a sharp right turn at Carrollton Avenue and continues on Carrollton to the intersection with Claiborne Ave.

I remember the first time I drove into New Orleans, to go to Tulane Law School. I came in late at night and was tired, and when I came to Canal Street, it had such an enormous "neutral ground," as the natives call the median, that I thought it was two separate streets, and I turned up the wrong side and had to back up into the intersection and turn again on the other side. Quite embarrassing.

Things like that stick in my memory. I remember having dates while I was at Tulane and paying a dime apiece for my date and me to ride the streetcar downtown to "hit the Quarter." The streetcar, as I recall, stopped running around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. for an hour, which was often when we were returning from the Quarter. I remember "making out" with my dates standing in the St. Charles neutral ground, where the streetcar tracks are, for that hour while cars were passing by on either side. Didn't faze us. We had hormones galore.

Then later, when I returned to New Orleans after practicing law in Nashville for two years, I went to work as a staff lawyer for Pan American Petroleum. The office was located right on Lee Circle. The streetcar was right outside the door. We practically had a chauffeur.

At lunch, we would either ride the streetcar "up the Avenue" to the Caribbean Room of the Pontchartrain Hotel, or "downtown" either to Kolb's (German restaurant - sauerbraten a specialty of the house) or one of the "seafood bars" that are famous to New Orleanians, but mostly unknown to tourists. While the Pontchartrain was relatively expensive, the seafood bars were a real bargain. A couple of dozen raw oysters or a platter of boiled shrimp and a beer, and I was good to go for the rest of the day. I have often said that  if you are going to be poor, it's better to be poor in New Orleans than anywhere else that I know of.  A "po boy" sandwich with half a dozen spicy fried shrimp "dressed" on hot French bread is  a typical workingman's meal in New Orleans, and that  would be considered a real delicacy in places like New York or Chicago.

Well, enough of my reminiscences.  Mary Anne is running errands,  and writing this  is making me hungry. I hope she stops by Pat's Seafood and brings home some boiled shrimp. Anyway, like that song by Gloria Gaynor says, we will  survive.

Jim Barton

Jim Barton has practiced law in New Orleans since 1966. He is married to the former Mary Anne Bryant who grew up in Athens. They now live in Covington, Louisiana, which is a small town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.