St. Charles Avenue and Lower Garden District Gateway

Why is it significant?

Begin your exploration of New Orleans' antebellum grandeur at the Lower Garden District gateway along St. Charles Avenue. Here, beneath the magnificent arching canopy of centuries-old live oaks draped in silvery Spanish moss, rolls the legendary St.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Begin your exploration of New Orleans' antebellum grandeur at the Lower Garden District gateway along St. Charles Avenue. Here, beneath the magnificent arching canopy of centuries-old live oaks draped in silvery Spanish moss, rolls the legendary St. Charles Avenue Streetcar, officially recognized as the oldest continuously operated street railway system in the world, carrying passengers continuously since September 26, 1835.

Look down at the olive-green Perley Thomas electric streetcars that rattle along the grassy neutral ground. Built in 1923 by the Perley A. Thomas Car Works of High Point, North Carolina, these vintage streetcars feature authentic mahogany walk-over seats, polished brass handrails, and hand-operated electric motor controllers, designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2014.

St. Charles Avenue was originally carved through indigo and sugarcane plantations in the 1830s as the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, wealthy American merchants, cotton brokers, and financiers flooded into New Orleans but were shunned by the aristocratic French and Spanish Creoles of the French Quarter. Undaunted, the Americans bought up the plantation lands of the Livaudais family upriver, creating the rival city of Lafayette in 1833 before it was annexed into New Orleans in 1852. Instead of building narrow townhouses flush with the sidewalk, the Americans constructed immense neoclassical villas set back in spacious private gardens, creating the celebrated Garden District. The wide central neutral ground was deliberately preserved as an open green promenade, planted with flowering azaleas and sweet olive shrubs that bloom in fragrant profusion each spring. As the streetcars glide along their steel tracks, the overhead copper wires sparkle in the afternoon sunlight filtering through Spanish moss.

Listening to the rhythmic clatter of streetcar wheels against the steel rails as the ocean breeze rustles the oak leaves, you feel the immense romantic elegance of nineteenth-century New Orleans. This green boulevard linked two distinct worlds into a single magnificent Southern metropolis.

Walk southwest into the tranquil residential circle of Coliseum Square.