St. Charles Avenue
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St. Charles Avenue is a thoroughfare in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is the home of the world famous St. Charles Streetcar Line. It is also famous for the hundreds of mansions that adorn the tree-lined boulevard for much of the Uptown section of the route.
[edit] The street
The down river end meets Canal Street. Across Canal Street in the French Quarter the equivilent street is Royal Street. From Canal Street St. Charles runs up through the New Orleans Central Business District, then the length of Uptown New Orleans, reflecting the crescent curve of the Mississippi River some distance inland. It continues to the Carrollton neighborhood, ending two blocks above Carrollton Avenue where it intersects with Leake Street/River Road at the foot of the Mississippi River levee.
From Canal Street to Lee Circle, it is one way in the upriver direction with two lanes of traffic, with the streetcar track sharing right-of-way with one lane of auto traffic. From Lee Circle to Louisiana Avenue it has two lanes of traffic in each direction with two streetcar rail lines on the grassy tree lined median ("neutral ground" in local parlance). From Louisiana Avenue to Carrollton Avenue it has one lane of traffic in each direction plus the streetcar neutral ground. The streetcar line turns inland on to Carrollton Avenue at this point. The final bit of St. Charles then has one lane of auto traffic in each direction for the one standard and one short block to the street's end.
[edit] History
For the first half of the 19th century, the portion of St. Charles above Lee Circle (then "Tivoli Circle") was known as "Nyades Street".
The street was laid out atop a slight rise, the remains of an old natural levee, in connection with the construction of the New Orleans & Carrollton Railway, which became the St. Charles Streetcar line.
The long traffic avenue with mass transit running down the center helped fuel the development of Uptown in the 19th century. The Avenue itself became the favored site for construction of mansions of the wealthy thru the early years of the 20th century.
A number of the old mansions were torn down in the mid and late 20th century until the area was declared an historic district. Many of the old mansions have been divided into apartments or condominniums, and others have found new use as homes for business, small hotels, and a library, but others remain privately owned single residences.
In early 1999, an increased effort by the NOPD was made to clean up the Avenue and the blocks north, which were beginning to show signs of seediness, and successfully pushed the drug industry backwards into Central City.
During the flooding of the majority of New Orleans in the aftermath of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (see: Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans), St. Charles Avenue and the portion of Uptown closer to the river did not receive significant flooding.
