From Transportation to Liberation ---
- - - - - - - New Orleans' Southern Railways Terminal
©KENNETH E. HALL HOUSTON, TX MAY 1, 2019
饾摑饾摳饾摻饾摫饾摬饾摲饾摪 饾摬饾摷 饾摤饾摳饾摲饾摷饾摻饾摢饾摲饾摻 饾摣饾摼饾摻 饾摤饾摫饾摢饾摲饾摪饾摦!
Nowhere in the United States has the love for the past so permeated into the culture of a community as it has in New Orleans. It can be said that New Orleanians are obsessed so much with what WAS that they miss what COULD be. There are many who do not share that point of view.
To be sure, the history of the city since its founding by the French in 1718 has been one of nothing BUT change - catastrophes such as major conflagrations, wars, and windstorms like Katrina. Each disaster left an indelible mark on the psyche and on the physical landscape of the city.
New Orleans has for long been divided into two factions: progressivists and preservationists. The preservationist extremists tend to oppose any project or change anywhere in the city, for any reason - in the name of potential "historical significance" (real or perceived). The converse is also true: Progressive extremists would bulldoze the entire French Quarter and pave over the area to make parking lots, if those once they had their way. Fortunately, most of the time at least, common sense and compromise has had its way, and after the dust settles, new projects are undertaken and architecturally valuable structures are usually spared demolition to make way for them.
♫♪♫♪♫♪♫
"Won't you come along with me
To the Mississippi
We'll take a boat to the land of dreams
Steam down the river, down to New Orleans...
The band's there to meet us
Old friends to greet us
Where all the light and the dark folks meet:
Heaven on earth - they call it Basin Street!" - - -
♫ Basin Street Blues, as recorded by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1928
♫♪♫♪♫♪♫
饾摏饾摢 饾摗饾摼饾摦 饾搼饾摢饾摷饾摷饾摬饾摲 - Basin Street
In the grand old river city of New Orleans, there is a street made famous by a song, "Basin Street Blues." Basin Street is a divided thoroughfare running perpendicular to Canal Street - New Orleans' main avenue. It is just one street over from the original city limits - Rampart Street. In other words, it runs just outside of the French Quarter and continues a few blocks past the French Quarter, then curves into and becomes Orleans Avenue. That's the way it is today, but go back 100 years, and things were much different.
Basin Street, infamous for its Storeyville Red Light District of long ago, and immortalized by the Jazz music that was born there, got its name from a turning basin for ships travelling on the Carondelet Canal. The canal itself was constructed on orders of the Spanish Governor of Louisiana from 1791 to 1797, Don Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet, 5th Baron of Carondelet, and was subsequently named for him. After well over a century of heavy use, the Carondelet Canal was eventually closed and filled in during the 1930's.
In the late 1800's and into the early 1900's, while the canal was in use, railroad tracks ran alongside, terminating at one of New Orleans' main railroad depots on Canal Street. The end of the line was the beautiful Southern Railway Terminal. The Crescent City was indeed a major hub of water and rail transportation, and remained so for decades to come, and the hub of all this activity was Basin Street.
A view of the newly-completed Southern Railway Terminal.
CANAL STREET - 1950
The Southern Railway Terminal at 1125 Canal Street is PARTIALLY visible behind Canal streetcar #801. The movie "Fancy Pants" with Bob Hope & Lucille Ball was playing at the Saenger Theater on the day this shot was taken. That movie was released July 19,1950, and Saenger used to get the movies shortly after release dates, so my guess is somewhere around 1 August, 1950. The terminal had less than five more years of existence, and the Canal Streetcar line itself was 14 years away from becoming a memory.
From this imposing alabaster building in the very heart of the city, people could travel to such places as Washington D.C., Louisville, Memphis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Savanna, Charleston, and Jacksonville. They could make day excursions to nearby Gulfport, Mississippi as well. Additionally, the terminal brought another type of clientele. For the first decade of its existence, in the words of NOLA.com: "it was in a way the front porch of Storyville, the place where trains would deposit them for a night of debauchery in the district. According to reports, some particularly welcoming Storyville prostitutes were known to strip down nude and beckon to passengers from their windows as the train passed on Basin Street." Storyville was located just one block away from the terminal.
In the days before Jim Crow, Basin street truly was the place, as the ORIGINAL version of Basin Street Blues says: "Where all the light and the dark folks meet". And so they did - - - in more ways than one. As the U.S. got involved in World War I and New Orleans became an important military city, Storeyville's "dens of iniquity" were closed by order of the Navy - for obvious reasons. The Navy did what the church and city government could not - or would not do. Storeyville operated from 1897 to 1917 - a short twenty years - yet its memory lives on in the music and folklore of New Orleans.
Les Chemins de Fer - The Railroads
New Orleans prides itself on its French heritage, and the city always desperately wanted itself to be likened to Paris. One comparison that can be made is its railway organization - - - or more specifically the LACK of organization.
Paris at one time possessed many railway stations, and they form a ring of dots around the city. Everything ends in Paris, it was once said, and Paris made sure this was the case. Trains from Lyon ended at the Gare (train station) de Lyon. Trains coming from Luxembourg terminated at the Gare de Luxembourg, and so forth. This arrangement was logical - Gallically speaking - and benefited both persons travelling to and from Paris, as well as the places served by the railways. But what if one was going from Lyon to Luxembourg? A change of trains was necessary, and that was an ordeal to say the least, requiring the hiring of a coach or taxi and a lengthy Odyssey through the narrow, congested streets of Paris. Not very practical.
Like Paris, trains tended to terminate in New Orleans, and they did so at one of several stations. Again, like Paris, it was a hassle getting from one terminal to the other. Like Paris, the city of New Orleans delighted in its terminus status and its beautiful railway stations, and people travelling by train from Miami to Los Angeles would have to go through the same cumbersome procedure as did the poor travellers in Paris.
Like Paris, there was much grumbling, but little or nothing was actually done about this multi-terminus situation until it was too late. Paris still has several railway stations (albeit fewer in number) but there are intracity trains and M茅tro lines that make the change of trains a bit less of a headache.
Unlike Paris and the whole of Europe, for that matter, passenger trains in the U.S. were, just after WWII, beginning a decline - a decline that would eventually see the virtual demise of intercity passenger rail travel - and certainly the decided marginalization of that form of transportation almost to the point of irrelevancy within just two decades.
Never mind the writing on the wall, businessmen and politicians alike thought this consolidation of passenger rail would benefit the public in general. It was a great idea - but, sadly, one whose time had come and gone.
"The steel rails still ain't heard the news..."
UNION PASSENGER TERMINAL - 1001 LOYOLA - AS IT APPEARED IN 1957 WHEN I TOOK A TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C. WITH MY GRANDMOTHER. I PURCHASED A FULL BOX OF 1,000 OF THESE POST CARDS FOR $1.00 FROM THE GIFT STORE OF UPT WHEN THEY WERE LIQUIDATING SOME OF THEIR INVENTORY. HAPPILY, TODAY, A NEW STREETCAR LINE SERVES SERVES THIS PASSENGER RAILROAD TERMINAL! SADLY, THERE ARE VERY FEW TRAINS USING THE FACILITY.
On January 8, 1954, the Union Passenger Terminal (UPT) opened its doors, and the place instantly became the city's rail hub. My grandfather commented at the time: "Railroad depot? The best thing can be said about it is that it would make a great place to raise mushrooms!" He was by no means a cynic - I like to think of him as an "enlightened realist". He would soon be proved correct, as the "writing on the wall" became the procession of notifications of cancellations of trains and cutback on service. Modern intercity buses, and the almighty automobile - both forms of travel that were largely responsible for killing off the streetcars in the United States, were eating into the ridership and profits of the once-great and powerful railroads, and they now were aided in their effort by the mighty and burgeoning Interstate Highway system that was set in place by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
There was one other elephant in the room - After WWII, Americans sought to travel more than ever before, and airlines offered an excellent and faster alternative to the train. People born at or before the Turn-of-the-Century were somewhat reluctant to embrace the idea of air travel, at least at first, but those of my mother's generation were quick to take to the air, and they did so in droves. The trains could not, and would not compete. So, as in the words of the Arlo Guthrie song "City of New Orleans": "This train's got the disappearing railroad blues!"
Getting back to the Southern Railway Terminal, although beautiful, the city could not abide such a beautiful structure. That attitude towards architecture permeated the city for awhile, and structures far more beautiful and historical fell to the wrecking ball and the jackhammer. So it was with this one. Rails were ripped up, streets were redesigned, and the monument to American engineering and economic power was reduced to rubble in short order.
ABOVE: NOLA.com's interesting article entitled "The Last Gasp of Storyville, in a Single New Orleans Photo" shows the station in its last phases of demolition.
No hay mal que por bien no venga. -- Spanish proverb, roughly equivalent to "Every cloud has a silver lining."
As the grass was growing green where once steel wheels did glide along on steel rails, it was now decided to erect a monument to, of all people, a Venezuelan politician! During the 1950's, the city of New Orleans still enjoyed a thriving trade with Latin America, and cultural and historical ties to the many nations to the south were strong. There were quite a number of residents of the city from all over Latin America, and there were also many New Orleanians living down there - so many so that only four years later, VIASA Airlines even began flying direct flights to Caracas from the city's expanding Moisant International Airport (MSY).
Eager to further "Latinize" an already historically Latin city, the mayor willingly accepted a gift from Venezuela and Venezuelan businessmen, of a statue and mini-plaza dedicated to a hero and liberator to not just Venezuela, but to six countries in South America. It can be said that Sim贸n Bol铆var was the George Washington of Latin America, and the erection of the statue paid homage to that fact.
On November 25, 1957, a 12' tall, 7 ton statue of El Libertador - "The Liberator" - Sim贸n Bol铆var - was dedicated with much fanfare, and by this naturally I mean a PARADE! This was, of course, New Orleans, and that is how we do things... with a great deal of whoop-la! On hand at the ceremonies was Mayor deLesseps "Chep" Morrison, who touted the monument as yet another example of the Crescent City's warm relationship with Latin America. The flags of the six countries liberated by Bol铆var were raised, and we enjoyed a time of warm friendship and mutual respect... at least for awhile. The monument to Sim贸n Bol铆var was placed in the very same spot where the Southern Railway Terminal once stood. Within a few years, monuments to Mexican and Honduran heroes were also erected. Now, in addition to street names such as Madrid, Salcedo, Ulloa, Rendon, L贸pez and others, monuments to people revered by Latin Americans are featured prominently on one of the city's major boulevards.
This site has gone from transportation to Liberation!
REMNANT
In the late Sixties I worked at Jaeger's Seafood Restaurant, at 1715 Elysian Fields. One day, for whatever reason, I decided to take a walk on the neutral ground (median) of that grand boulevard. In about the 1800 block I saw what at first looked like an old, forgotten tombstone! New Orleans is famous for things that seemingly do not belong, yet nonetheless are there anyway. I wondered what timely person lay sleeping beneath a granite stone in the median of a great thoroughfare! Upon closer examination I discovered it not to be a tombstone, but rather a mile-marker, bearing the inscription: "ONE MILE FROM RIVER". At that time (I was a teenager) I had no idea that there had ever been any rails on Elysian Fields. I learned as I got older that this was a major railroad artery with several sets of tracks and plenty of trains. To my knowledge, this stone is the only remnant to a once-thriving rail operation that has come and gone.
Sadly, I was too young to have any memories of the old Southern Railway Terminal on Canal Street. So many other things have changed that the city I grew up in is today almost unrecognizable in some parts. In my view, far too many wonderful things I recall about my youth and childhood have disappeared - gone to join the swelling ranks of things that I look back upon.
A poem entitled DESERATA advises me to "Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth..." - but I am not so sure how graceful I have been so far - or will be in the future as more and more things fall by the wayside.
On the other hand, the streetcars, once ripped up literally overnight from Canal Street, and consigned to the scrap yards and museums, have happily returned, and one new line serves the Union Passenger Terminal..
⚜
For historical views of the Southern Railways depot and other stations, check out "Old New Orleans.com" at:
http://old-new-orleans.com/NO_Stations.html
For a photo and info in the Sim贸n Bol铆var monument, check out Blake's page:
https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/blake_pontchartrain/article_9f0bd142-e2d2-53bb-855d-f0c31a6785e5.html
and this is also an interesting article on the statue:
https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/03/mardi-gras-parade-cam-watch-the-krewes-of-hermes-detat-and-morpheus-roll-live.html
and finally, a link to a photo of the demolition of the Southern Railway Terminal:
https://www.nola.com/entertainment/2019/02/the-last-gasp-of-storyville-in-a-single-new-orleans-photo.html
DESITERATA - Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright ©1952.
