“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.” A letter from Samuel Clemens to his sister1.
Lea from the Deep celebrating Mardi Gras
He did not say the world has not seen America. He focused on the Americans whose American experience is not complete without Mardi Gras. Many visitors have shared with me on tours that they knew nothing about New Orleans beyond the Mardi Gras stereotypes before the tour.
When I lived in China, I kept a daily blog. It was to keep in touch with my friends and family back home, but some of my entries got public attention. One of my blogs continued getting comments for years until I finally unpublished it. I was tired dealing with the public judgment of the thoughts of 23-year-old Lea.
But that blog was entitled “Is America Culture-less?” And I think I struck some SEO magic with those young thoughts. It was my musing on how incomprehensible it was for me to hear Europeans calling America “culture-less” as a Louisianan. I was in extreme culture shock when I wrote that blog — a mixture of exhilaration and frustration at the new and unknown with a longing earned via a deeper understanding of that which I did know.
I’m learning with more experience that our culture is American culture. So much of the music, food, art, literature, slang…culture of our time springs forth from the mouth of the Mississippi, spread around the world just like so much of the country’s goods. (And don’t forget: everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people.)
It’s been nearly 20 years since I had to travel around the world to learn how much I love my home. And how much I hate my home. And how much so many others love my home. And how much I have left to learn to understand. My home.
127 days until Mardi Gras 2025. Hopefully I get to meet you while you get to see America from the perspective of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Is Canal Street, at 171 feet wide, the widest street in the world? Many sources on the history of Canal Street will include the fact that this is the widest street in the world, sometimes in America, sometimes in New Orleans. The reason for the girth (and the name) is the planned but never built here canal.123
Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2011630059/>.
While I grew up across the lake, my mom grew up on this side. Canal Street in the 1960s was the shopping district. I learned from stories from my mom’s childhood about going shopping with her aunts on Canal Street, getting dressed up and taking the bus to spend the day going to the fancy shops and eating yummy food. It was a special treat to get to go to Canal Street to go shopping.
Canal Street was laid out around the turn of the 19th century and reached its most prominent time in the 1840s, according to Richard Campanella, when the Americans were flooding into the city and settling upriver from the French Quarter. Canal Street became the border between the two neighborhoods, Faubourg Ste. Marie and the Vieux Carre. Some say that the term neutral ground (still used today instead of median) originated here. This area was a neutral territory between the Americans and the Creoles, who some historians say had hostile relations.
I heard the fact about the widest street in the world and repeated it without question4. Canal Street is still often a sparkling magical place of my mom’s childhood in my memories. But the person I repeated it to, thankfully, questioned it. It came up again on a tour recently, where I had to break the news.
Widest Street in the World
A Google search for “widest street in the world” does not return Canal Street as the answer. The result, in Argentina, is 110 meters and 16 lanes wide, which is more than double the width of Canal Street. They built this roadway well into the 20th century though. It couldn’t have been the widest road in 1891 when the Library of Congress published images with captions claiming Canal Street as the broadest street in the world.
View on Canal St., New Orleans broadest street in the world, U.S.A. Washington, D.C.: J.F. Jarvis, Publisher, Jun 2, 1891. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,<www.loc.gov/item/2015645053/>.
Broadest Street in America
You can find many sources showing Canal Street as the broadest street in America5. Wikipedia has narrowed this down further, “Canal Street is often said to be the widest roadway in America to have been called a street, instead of the avenue or boulevard titles more typically appended to wide urban thoroughfares.”6 This seems like it’s possibly only oft-repeated by tour guides as it doesn’t include a source for this claim, but using semantics like these does make it far more likely to be true.
Googling “widest street in America” returns many results too, including a street in New Hampshire that is 172 ft wide7 and one in Oklahoma that is “six ft short of being as wide as a football field”8. This could mean 294 ft (a football field is 100 yards or 300 ft long), 354 ft (360 ft long with end zones), or 154 ft (160 ft wide).
A Google search for “widest street in New Orleans” does return Canal Street in the AI results! AI is compiling answers from all over the web, so if it’s on the internet we can believe it, right?
Screen shot of AI Google results on October 13, 2024.
The planned canal that was never here was actually built where the Pontchartrain Expressway/Boulevard is today, which is obviously wider to the naked eye than Canal Street, with a huge park as a neutral ground. According to Richard Campanella, the New Basin Canal was 60 ft wide with a foot print of 300 ft9. The photos demonstrate that construction took up all of the allotted space for the new road, more than double the space of Canal Street. But the road over the canal is called boulevard not street…
Semantics
One side of the former canal is called West End Boulevard and the other is Pontchartrain Boulevard/Expressway. Perhaps the separate names cause the distinction? Or maybe it’s because it’s a boulevard and not a “street”. I don’t know of any roadways named street that are wider than Canal in New Orleans, but I also am definitely not familiar with all the streets in New Orleans. Do you know of any wider streets?
Was Canal the widest roadway in the world at sometime? Possibly. Is Canal the widest street in New Orleans now? Maybe. That road in Argentina is an Avenida, not Calle, so it might not even outrank Canal. I think with enough qualifications we can probably make anything a superlative. Tour guides are especially good at this trick, so be careful about what you repeat 😉
When the weather gets cooler, even for just one day, who else craves gumbo? The traditional stew of seasoning vegetables, meat and rich roux-based soup served over rice satisfies my hunger and my soul during the fall.
When I was growing up, my dad would take my sister and me crabbing in the rivers that end in the lake where the water is brackish. If we caught any smaller ones, my mom would process them and freeze them, always calling them gumbo crabs. She added half crabs in shell to the gumbo to cook. That is still my favorite gumbo recipe by far.
Sometimes New Orleanians mistake authenticity for traditionalism. Authenticity is an evolution by definition, as it is your own. Traditionalism, clinging to the past because it is old, is often not true to now. In my experience, this is often demonstrated through recipes. Many people who live in the area of the country known for making gumbo will tell you that only their recipe is correct. Whatever they grew up eating is the only right way to eat gumbo. Does it have tomatoes? Garlic? Did you use jarred roux? What kind of sausage? Did you dare to mix chicken and seafood? Rice or potato salad? Both?! Add the potato salad or keep it on the side?
The rules for gumbo are exhausting. And entirely made up, like so many New Orleans myths.
Once, someone claimed to me that their recipes were the only authentic ones because they were over 100 years old. This was in the year of our lord 2022, so Louisiana was THREE hundred years old. There are plenty of recipes printed and published before 1922. Why does this person think that’s when authentic gumbo was invented? And why does anyone think that 100 year old recipes will satisfy our modern palates?
Because these are some of the oldest gumbo recipes I found. No mention of roux, lots of tomatoes, and beef…or rat or pickled lizard as the protein.
Gumbo Recipe 1838 The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana Tue, Oct 23, 1838 Page 2
Gumbo Recipe 1838 The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana Wed, Dec 12, 1838 Page 2
Let me know which you’re willing to try… Old gumbo recipes show that we should be familiar with the past before we cling to it. Or we don’t even know we are clinging to pickled lizard and owl gumbo.
Do you have a favorite gumbo recipe to share? I’d love to hear it!
