Canal Street

“ Canal street, which every loyal resident of New Orleans believes to be the finest parade street in all the world, is ablaze with the incandescence of electricity, a-jam with humanity. For a week the trains have been bringing the folk in from half-a-dozen neighboring states by the tens of thousands. ”

“ Nothing can be more picturesque than the infinite variety of queer gables and pediments, the ogees, scrolls, and dormer windows of the houses in the canal streets, each with a projection to which a crane can be attached, jutting out from the topmost twist of the mouldings, like a unicorn's horn out of his forehead. The lines of the windows, varying in each house from those of its neighbor, give them the charm of individuality, even in a street, which we so sorely miss in London. There is a trottoir and generally a row of trees by each canal, which introduces another element unlike Venice. ”

“ Canal Street is to New Orleans much more than Main Street is to Buffalo, much more than Broad Street is to Philadelphia, much more than Broadway and Fifth Avenue are to New York, for Canal Street divides New Orleans as no other street divides an American city. It divides New Orleans as the Seine divides Paris, and there is not more difference between the right bank of the Seine and the Latin Quarter than between American New Orleans and Creole New Orleans: between the newer part of the city and the vieux carré. ”

“ When the flash and glare and brilliancy of Canal Street have palled upon the tired eye, and it is yet too soon to go home, and to such a prosaic thing as dinner, and one still wishes for novelty, then it is wise to go in the lower districts. ”

“ Having just enough money to live on, we tramped about the city, which I find very interesting, especially the part below Canal Street which is here called the French part of town. Above Canal Street the people mostly speak English, and below Canal Street they mostly speak French. The houses in the French part are low squatty buildings as compared with those on the other side. Canal Street seems to divide everything. It is very wide, with a horse-car track in the middle and a regular street on each side of it. The cars are all drawn by mules. ”

“ This vast territory is traversed by lines of horse-cars which all meet in Canal Street, the most important business thoroughfare of the city, which runs north-east from the river, and divides the French from the American quarter. One taking a horse-car in any part of the city will ultimately land, having boxed the compass, in Canal Street. But it needs a person of vast local erudition to tell in what part of the city, or in what section of the home of the frog and crawfish, he will land if he takes a horse-ear in Canal Street. ”

“ Canal Street in the early forties was, par excellence, a resident street. From Camp and Chartres Streets, way back as far as sidewalks were flagged or bricked, which was only a few blocks, Canal Street was lined with homes, side by side, often without even an alley to separate them, as though land was scarce and one need economize space, whereas just beyond was land in plenty, but no sidewalks or easy approaches to speak of. ”

“ A project, widely and favorably considered in 1825, but which came to nothing, advocated the extension of Canal Street, as a canal, from river to river. The street took its name naturally from the little stream which was called a canal. When the street was filled in and improved, the stream was continued through a sewer leading from Centre Street. The locality at the foot of the street has received the local title of "Suicide Slip" because of the number of persons in recent years who have ended their lives by jumping into Hudson River at that point. ”

“ That vast gray building on Canal Street, which seemeth ancient as Karnac, and upon which princely sums have vainly been expended in the foolish hope of completing it, has long troubled us with a strange impression difficult to analyze. ”

“ To-morrow's procession, the visitors said, would form in Canal Street, move up St. Charles, return down Camp Street into Canal, pass through it into Rampart, take the Bayou Road and march to a grand review away out in the new camp of instruction at the Creole Race-Course. Intermediately, from a certain Canal Street balcony, Flora would present the flag! the gorgeous golden, silken, satin battle standard which the Callenders and others had helped her to make. ”

“ The crowd of vehicles on the street is not so dense, and the "foot passengers" are somewhat thinned put. The lower part of the city, which is devoted exclusively to business, is deserted. For blocks the only persons to be seen are the policemen on their beats. Above Canal street, however, all is life and bustle. The street is brilliantly lighted. ”

“ Standing beside their booths or stands, or in front of their shops, on both sides of the street, on the banks of the canal, and moving through the streets, are to be seen and heard a multitude of men, active, scrambling, energetic, carrying their wares on their heads, shoulders, or in their hands, pushing through the crowd, offering them vociferously for sale, and producing a strange din and noise whilst they recommend them to buyers with their sing-song cries. ”

“ The sixty squares ("islets" according to the Creole idiom, because each block was literally an islet in time of flood) which comprise the old French town established in 1718 by the Sieur de Bienville, are unlike the rest of the city not merely in architecture, but in all respects. The street names change at Canal Street, the highways become narrower as you enter the French quarter, and the pavements are made of huge stone blocks brought over long ago as ballast in sailing ships. Nor is the difference purely physical. ”

“ On leaving the steamer the old man, not wishing to attract attention, avoided the broad street, with its arcades and cafes, instead picking his way along the canal, packed with fishing craft of every description, until he to a superb white bridge, the pride of the little town. ”

“ We could not hear the machine-gun nor any shouting. The world was like a picture smoking under a moon now red and hard. Against the wall of the street two women were huddled, one on her knees, her head pressed against the thighs of the other, who stood stretched as though crucified, her arms out, staring on to the Canal. Beside a little kiosk, on the space exactly in front of the side street, lay a man on his face. ”

“ It resembles neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has something or other in common with all of these. There is all the incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the Grand Canal—the silent highway of the City of the Sea—is more like it in [Pg 468] general effect than any other street in Europe. ”

“ On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great Canal was completed and, while his early impression of the unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his visions of journeying by canal were yet to be realized. At the foot of Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, passed under Seventh Street bridge, and with the other passengers lingered on deck to see Richmond slowly disappear in the distance. ”

“ If, led by inclination or compelled by necessity, you go into the street, you find the space between the sidewalks transformed into a miniature river. In some of the streets the pavements are more than three feet high, and pedestrians walk on them as on the tow-path of a canal, passing from one side of the torrent to the other on small wooden crossings. ”

“ Sometimes you'll trot out to the front, all keyed up, and then sit around among the "Set-Sanks" for a month playing pinochle, and watching the flies chase each other across the marmalade. And then a sultry dull day will suddenly show you things....
Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate narrow little streets that run down to the canal, like spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its earthworks and group of defenders. Out over the canal stretched footbridges, and these were thickly sown with barbed wire.
"Great luck," said Rossiter. "They're making an old-time barricade. ”

“ In Main Street, the finest street in Georgetown, the canal has been filled in to form a broad walk, an obvious precedent for the treatment of the other canals, which (however beautiful) are useless and merely act as breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The principal residences, standing in their own gardens surrounded by foliage and flowers, are scattered over the town, as are also the slums, almost the worst of which abut on the best residential quarters. ”

“ CHAPTER IV Running north from Storey’s Gate, the backs of its western houses abutting on the network of conduits which fed what is now in St. James’s Park called the Ornamental Water, but which was then “The Canal,” was a short road, or row, named Duke Street, in which was situated the building—subsequently the town home of Jeffreys, the filthy Fouquier Tinville of an earlier revolution—known as the Admiralty House. ”

“ Instead of having street-cars and horses and taxicabs everybody goes in long boats called gondolas. The main street in the city is the Grand Canal, and in this canal come all sorts of people with all sorts of water-crafts. ”

“ Andrew's church, Roman Catholic, Duane St. and City Hall Place. 1843 Mariners' Temple, Baptist, Oliver and Henry Sts. 1846 Trinity church, Episcopal, Broadway at Wall St.
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EAST SIDE STREETS Chatham Square, after William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, our friend in 1776. Bayard Street, after a mayor, nephew of Peter Stuyvesant. Canal Street, had a forty-foot canal in center, fine shaded houses at sides. Division Street, the dividing line between the Rutgers and the DeLancey farms. East Broadway, formerly Harmon Street, after a Rutgers. Henry Street, after Henry Rutgers. ”

“ First Merchants’ Exchange
Broad Street had become a desirable place of residence and many citizens of the better class made it their home. The canal or ditch through the middle of it, from the present Exchange Place to the river, would never have been there if New York had not been originally a Dutch town. ”

“ And be it further enacted, That a street be laid out along the entire length of said canal, on the south side thereof, of the width of eighty feet, between said Sixth and Fifteenth streets west, which shall be kept open for ever as a public street, and subjected to the same rules, regulations, and ordinances, as shall and may affect the other streets and avenues in said city ”

“ It is correctly laid out in square divisions, formed by five streets over a mile long, crossed by very numerous short ones, and is intersected by canals, which are its real roadways. I have not seen a pack-horse in the streets; everything comes in by boat, and there are few houses in the city which cannot have their goods delivered by canal very near to their doors. These water-ways are busy all day, but in the early morning, when the boats come in loaded with the vegetables, without which the people could not exist for a day, the bustle is indescribable. ”

“ RAILWAYS AND CANALS. “Canals are to the inhabitants of a country what seas are to nations; they equally serve to assist the wants of society and benefit commerce.”—Cresy.
There is no movement of modern times that has been more pregnant in its results, or more interesting in its course of development, than that which has given to the world its existing system or systems of transportation. Of that movement, the competition of the railway and the canal for the traffic that has been equally open to both has been a phase that has received less attention than it deserved. ”

“ How delighted were the old tavern-keepers in central New York with the opening of the Erie Canal, on whose boats immigrants ate and slept? About as happy, we may say, as were the canal operators when a railway was built, hurrying travelers on at such a rapid pace that their destinations could be reached, in many cases, between meals!
Yet until the railway came, the fast mail-stages rolled along over the Genesee Road, keeping alive the old traditions and the old breed of horses. Local business was vastly increased by the dawning of the new era ”

“ Several booths are erected in the market square, the proprietors and attaches of two peregrinating theatres, several peep-shows, and a dozen various games of chance, are vying with each other in the noisiness of their demonstrations to attract the attention and small change of the crowd to their respective enterprises. Like every other highway in this part of France the Marne and Bhine Canal is fringed with an avenue of poplars, that from neighboring elevations can be seen winding along the beautiful valley for miles, presenting a most pleasing effect. ”

“ The workmen, of whom there may be hundreds, with the exception of a few boys, who stand at the mouth of the pit to unload the coal waggons as they come up, or to run them into the tram-road that connects them with the neighbouring railroad, or canal, are all under-ground. ”

“ No work in America before its time began to compare in magnitude with grubbing that sixty-foot aisle from Lake Erie to the Hudson and the digging of a forty-foot canal in its center.
Since necessity is the mother of invention, it is not strange that here in the New York woods should have been perfected some strange machinery—great tugging monsters which should bodily haul down immense trees with a crash and pluck out green stumps with single groan. ”

“ And whereas the state of New York, holding the first commercial rank in the United States, possesses within herself the best route of communication between the Atlantic and western waters, by means of a canal, between the tide waters of the Hudson river and Lake Erie,—through which the wealth and trade of that large portion of the United States, bordering on the upper lakes, would for ever flow to our great commercial emporium. ”