Tag: New Canal

Canal Street: The Widest Street Debate
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).

Postcard by Adolph Selige Pub. Co., circa 1905 via https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=51605

Widest Street in New Orleans

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 😉

Sources

“The Historical Significance of Canal Street.” New Orleans FrenchQuarter.com https://www.frenchquarter.com/historical-significance-of-canal-streets/ ↩︎
Hawkins, Dominique M. Et. Al. “Canal Street Historic District,” City of New Orleans Historic Landmarks Commission. May 2011. https://nola.gov/nola/media/HDLC/Historic%20Districts/Canal-Street.pdf ↩︎
“Canal Street Study,” City Planning Commission, City of New Orleans. October 16, 2018. https://nola.gov/nola/media/City-Planning/CANAL-STREET-STUDY-FINAL-10-16-18.pdf ↩︎
“Canal Street Historic District,” Historic Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=51605 ↩︎
“New Orleans Jazz History Walking Tours: Canal Street,” New Orleans Jazz Commission, National Park Service. https://npshistory.com/publications/jazz/brochures/canal-street-walking-tours.pdf ↩︎
“Canal Street, New Orleans,” Wikipedia.org, Retrieved on October 10, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Street,_New_Orleans ↩︎
Rumrill, Alan F. “A moment in local history: The ‘Widest Paved Main Street in the World,” The Keene Sentinel, May 9, 2020. https://www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/a-moment-in-local-history-the-widest-paved-main-street-in-the-world-by-alan/article_41403075-ba96-5750-8e4e-ad69d2ea8289.html ↩︎
“Marshall, Oklahoma: Widest Main Street in USA,” Roadside America. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/77221 ↩︎
Campanella, Richard. “Before the Pontchartrain Expressway: Last days of the New Basin Canal.” Preservation in Print, June 6, 2024. https://prcno.org/before-the-pontchartrain-expressway-last-days-of-the-new-basin-canal/ ↩︎
Lea Pearl
A Tale of Irish in New Orleans
Museum Review: New Canal Lighthouse Museum

March is Louisiana’s Irish American Heritage Month, and my personal immigrant connection to New Orleans is through my Irish Heritage. Today, we credit Irish immigrants with making New Orleans into one of the world’s cosmopolitan cities, helping to shape the accent, and building the New Basin Canal. I always knew that some of my mom’s ancestors came from Ireland to New Orleans. I recently realized that their immigration coincided with the years of the “Potato Famine” or the “Great Hunger”.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a first generation Irish New Orleanian born in 1861. Her parents were both born in Ireland, as was her eventual husband. Her family settled in the Irish Channel. She ran a boarding house on Chippewa Street, like many other Irish women who immigrated to New Orleans and other American cities.

“Many Irish women, married and widowed, ran boarding houses as a means of support. Married Irish women could do so as well as sew on contract or help out in other kinds of family enterprise. The mother of Archbishop Williams of Boston had immigrated to the United States as a single woman and after marriage managed a boarding house while her husband worked as a blacksmith. When he died she ran both the boarding house and a grocery story in order to underwrite her son’s education. Some of the Irish boarding houses run by women also expanded into hotels and restaurants.”
Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century

Early recognition that the epidemic affected strangers who were coming to town for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras day in 1815 was February 7.
Richmond Enquirer. March 1, 1815.

New Basin Canal

The mass immigration of Irish people in the mid-19th century coincided with the building of the New Basin Canal in New Orleans. “Substantial Irish communities exploded in size across the last half of the nineteenth century in San Francisco, Omaha, Memphis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, and Denver. The Irish showed up in large numbers wherever workers were needed,” Diner writes.

In the 1830s and 1840s, they hadn’t yet figured out how Yellow Fever spread. But they knew it killed many people who did not grow up in New Orleans. The nickname “The Stranger’s Disease” appeared during this era. They chose to hire Irish people to dig the canal because the cost of losing enslaved people who may die during the construction was greater than the cost of paying Irishmen to dig. They did not also lose an asset when an Irish person died. The Irish had no defenses against the tropical disease. A coinciding cholera epidemic caused the death of 8,000 or more Irish immigrants digging the canal. Ghost stories will tell you that they buried them where the fell — under the sidewalks lining Ponchartrain Boulevard today.

The Lighthouse Museum

The New Canal Museum is located in the lighthouse at the mouth of the New Basin Canal. This is the only portion of the canal that remains today. Before the mid-20th century when it was filled, the canal cut from the lake to the area near where the Superdome is today. There was a turning basin at the end. The canal made it easy to move goods into the city using the lake as a shortcut. The turning basin made it possible for large barges to turn around instead of having to back out of the canal.

Display about how many women Lighthouse Keepers served at this location.

The museum is where I learned about the Victorian hinges still used all over New Orleans. There are images of the lighthouse completely destroyed during hurricanes, but the hinges remain locked in place.

This location is also unique in how many women served. A significant portion of the tour focused on these special women.

I signed up to visit the New Canal Museum through the New Orleans Public Library’s Culture Pass. There is a volunteer tour guide who is extremely knowledgeable about the lighthouse, the canal, and New Orleans. He provides a free tour. He also knew about the Irish influence on New Orleans, including pointing me to to the Celtic Cross Memorial on Pontchartrain Boulevard, which I will share in a coming post.

Irish New Orleans: Other options for learning more about the Irish influence on New Orleans

New Canal Lighthouse Museum

Celtic Cross Memorial on Pontchartrain Boulevard

Irish Cultural Museum

St. Patrick’s Church

Gallier House and Gallier Hall

Irish Channel

Irish New Orleans Trivia

James Gallier was born James Gallagher in Ireland.

Alexander O’Reilly, an Irish mercenary at the service of the Spanish crown, was the Spanish governor who murdered the Frenchmen and gave the famous street its name.

The New Orleans Revolt of 1768 in The Derby Mercury Derby Derbyshire, England April 6, 1770 Page 1

Margaret the Bread Lady was an Irish immigrant whose time in New Orleans was so impactful that a statue of her at the intersection of Prytania and Camp streets was one of the first public statues of a woman in the country.

Margaret the Bread Lady between 1890-1901

Margaret the Bread Lady in 2024

Delphine LaLaurie was born Delphine MaCarty. Her great grandfather was a captain in the Irish regiment of Albemarle who escaped the tyranny of the English kings to France and became a knight of St. Louis. Delphine’s grandfather came to Louisiana from France in 1732.

Source:

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. The Johns Hopkins University Press © 1983 Baltimore, Maryland.
Lea Pearl