Long Desired, Streetcar Returns to New Orleans

Passengers board the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. The line uses the same streetcars the city bought in 1923.

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Chris Graythen / Getty Images

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Progress comes slowly to New Orleans, but come it does. And one of the latest signs of that progress — more than two years after Hurricane Katrina — is the return of the beloved St. Charles Avenue Streetcar to Uptown New Orleans.

Its sound had been sorely missed along the grandest avenue of New Orleans.

To hear that old rumble of steel wheels come grumbling up behind you, to turn and see those green streetcars back on the tracks again is like seeing an old friend who's been away a while. And that means something around here.

Johnny Avie has been a New Orleans streetcar driver for 25 years.

"I was just thinking about how much hasn't changed," he says. "Like today, the weather is changing. It's getting from being cold to warm and the tracks actually sweats, like a person does, because of the temperature."

And sweaty tracks mean slippery tracks. So, on mornings like this one, Avie has to click a button on the floor that drops sand on the tracks as the car goes along. There's no modern technology at play — no little wipers out in front to mop up the tracks.

The St. Charles Streetcar line has eschewed modernization and uses the same streetcars the city bought in 1923. That means riders do without heat and air conditioning.

Hot or cold, riders "love their streetcar," Avie says.

Winter's really not too bad and in the summer, there's nothing quite like putting all the windows down and catching a breeze as you roll under the canopy of giant, old oaks, passing the fabulous mansions of the Garden District.

"I guess it's just so much a part of New Orleans," the driver says.

Like a Grande Dame who still wears her gloves and hat, the St. Charles was the only streetcar line that survived when New Orleans ripped up all the other tracks around town and switched to buses. And even though in the last decade two other streetcar lines have sprung up, the St. Charles line remains the original, the Old Guard.

If you don't count the interruption from Katrina (and nobody around here intends to) it's the oldest continuous-running streetcar line in America.

Residents are "glad we're back," Avie says.

He knows it from the honking cars and hand-waving he's been getting lately. He understands that kind of love. It's the same way he feels about this city, his home for the last 28 years.

"I found out how much I loved it when the storm ran me away from here," Avie says. "And all I wanted to do was get back over here. I [started] to miss New Orleans. There's no place like New Orleans, you know. It's something intoxicating about this city. You stay a certain period of time, it's hard to leave. I hated it when I came here. I tried to leave several times, but I couldn't. And after that I just didn't want to leave."

Now he just wants things to be right again. The St. Charles line still isn't quite back to its old self, just yet. It runs about 6 1/2 miles — half the length it was before the storm. New Orleans transit officials hope to have most of it restored by year's end. It'd be quite an early Christmas present.

"There's just something about the St. Charles Line that shows how much this city is back," Avie says. "You know if we can get our line back ...."

He lets the words just kind of hang there in the air. If they can get their line back, maybe they can get the whole city back.

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