The following is a stereo presentation of WUIS TV, New Orleans We were operating a place that manufactured fun.

It was a challenge each year to to find new equipment to whet the appetite for the local people.

Pontchartrain Beach was a place for many years where boy met girl.

I have found many people who met their wives there or their boyfriends there, and it was a boy meets girl place Pelican Stadium was a small community within this neighborhood, and it had its hierarchy.

It had its general manager and the ticket sellers and the concessionaires, and everyone had that strata, which they belonged to.

And everyone knew everybody else which took care of everybody.

We'd see all these costumes and all these characters and on the way to Claiborne Street, because that's where Carnival took place for us.

That was Mardi Gras for us.

You know, we made our way to the Claiborne Avenue hello.

I'm Peggy Scott Laborde.

Changes happen so fast nowadays that the past seems to be distancing itself at an accelerated pace.

Nevertheless, there are some things to be learned and appreciated from the New Orleans that was beach and the beach at Pontchartrain Beach.

You have fun.

You'll have fun every day of the week.

You love the thrilling rides left to your sides at Pontchartrain, Pontchartrain Beach, with the sights and sounds converging in so many different ways.

Maybe it's best to start at the beginning.

The sign that said you were indeed at the beach It opened in 1939 as an outgrowth of a smaller amusement park with the same name that was nearby.

What New Orleanians came to know was Pontchartrain Beach was at the end of Elysian Fields Avenue.

The beach was located where the Avenue and Lake Pontchartrain meet It's such a landmark as that.

That circle at the end of Elysian Fields.

Circling that circle was when you're learning.

When we were learning to drive was a big deal to go in a circle like that.

It was the end of the road.

It had so much significance and history in New Orleans.

And making that history was the bad family.

Headed by Harry Batt senior who worked closely with his two sons, Harry Junior and John.

My dad was a great a great one, believing in promotions.

He used to have tie ups with radio stations and television stations.

He was a real promoter.

He liked show business.

He liked it very much.

His father's flair for the theatrical was very much reflected in Pontchartrain Beach or the beach, as it was more familiarly known.

It was laid out in a linear fashion along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, with the water's edge on one side and the rides paralleling the shore.

A day or evening spent there provided opportunities for swimming, for adventures on the rides, snacking along the midway, or just people watching the beach.

Seasons stretched from late spring to Labor Day.

Harry Bade, seniors love of travel took him around the world in search of bigger and better amusement rides.

From Germany came the Wild Mouse.

That was a name that was used in in Europe.

In Germany.

And we first saw that ride at the Octoberfest in Munich.

It was a type of roller coaster.

It got its name from, if you could imagine, a mouse breeding in and out.

And the car actually when you looked over, there was nothing on either side of you, which gave you an eerie feeling.

And of course, it was a very, very popular ride.

From Italy came the bumper cars but very American was the Zephyr Dad had a contest held with the local people here.

Someone had taken it off the name of the Burlington Zephyr, which was a crack train which ran between Chicago and Denver.

And for many years, the loading station resembled the pulling member of the Burlington Zephyr.

I can tell you my best memory on the Zephyr.

I was very young, but I took my grandmother and she was in the in the ride within the seat with me on the Zephyr.

I will never forget this.

And just as we went down the first big drop, she lost her eyeglasses and she was a little flustered.

And I thought that was the funniest thing that I ever had happened to me.

Because, you know, instead of feeling sorry for as a typical kid would do it was I thought it was hilarious.

But she liked it.

I was always somehow too terrified to go on the Zephyr.

So I never did do that.

Not even once.

Yeah.

Wrote The Zephyr from lots of times and that was creepy, I thought, because it was wooden, so it was all shaky.

But the wild mouse really was much scarier.

Just it was a dramatic ride.

And the reason that it was so scary was that you said in front of the wheels, and so your little cart would kind of go off the track and then it would cut back like this.

That would kind of jerk your head.

And so that was kind of frightening.

Far more gentle was the bug.

And for the kids, there was kiddy land in the middle of kitty land was a lighthouse, a landmark that had survived from the days when the beach sight was the location of a resort area known as Burg.

For anyone growing up in New Orleans, Pontchartrain Beach held some indelibly etched memories.

The most vivid memory is because of the mess.

It's because it's the most embarrassing.

And that was it was an eighth grade.

We went on our eighth grade picnic from Saint Leo, the grade school to Pontchartrain Beach.

You know, the homeroom mothers got carpools together and took us all out there.

And we had our requisite spam on white bread sandwiches, probably and we had to wait an hour and a half before we went in the water, which was, you know, typical fifties.

This was 1956, the summer of 56.

And so then we finally get to go in the water.

And somehow I managed to get in a circle of buoys in the water, which was a heady thing for someone my age.

And so we're all splashing and joking and I ducked down under the water and, and then I come up and I saw, I don't know what made me look down, but I looked down and there I noticed my two foam rubber falsies half moons above my bathing suit.

And I just wanted to die.

A beach attraction that remained popular through the years where the stage shows the stage was an elevated platform, concrete construction between the midway and the shore of the lake.

So everyone had a good view of the stage of the stand up audience type of thing.

The shows were not that terribly long that you couldn't stand for 15 or 20 minutes, always drawing a crowd were the beauty contests.

One night it could be a Miss New Orleans contest.

The next evening, a competition for Miss Harvest Queen.

My dear, I used to judge those through midday.

We judged one of the Miss New Orleans contests and apparently one of the girls mothers didn't like our selection because she wasn't named as a Miss New Orleans.

And we got off stage.

We had a run because this woman ran after us.

She was going to like, beat us up because we had that was a kind of level of contest.

It was even more daring than facing irate mothers.

Were daredevils being shot out of a cannon.

Then there were also beauties of another type among the beaches.

Patrons in the early 1950s was a young man who would become a music legend.

Elvis Presley came to the beach when he was on his ascent when he was a rising star.

My dad met him over in Hawaii when he was buying trappings for the Ballet High Restaurant.

He was doing a movie over there called Blue Hawaii.

And he he remembered my father very well because dad had treated he and his girlfriend, I think, on another visit to the beach, you know, to the to the midway and to the rides and everything, and had him in his office and he's quite a quite a very he was a very charming young man, a very polite young man and charming.

The crowds were stunts held on the beach stage such as the Jell-O jump.

We built a large, large vat out of plywood and we filled it up with gelatin and we put the keys a number of keys down in the bottom of the vat.

And one of them was for a motorcycle.

You had to go down into the jello and get the right key And of course, when you came out of the Jell-O, you were covered with the red, red gelatin.

You know, it was a funny, funny act that was a very clever promotion.

If you were more interested in dining than diving, there was the Bali High restaurant with its Polynesian theme.

I had the first orange aid and Valley High.

I had never heard of Orange Aid.

And what a delicious treat that was Orange Head, you know.

Oh, that felt so sophisticated.

To have Orange Aid In the final years of the beach, the rage was the raging Cajun It was a rod that I saw on the opera land with just two spirals in it.

But we wanted the two features of the the double spiral and the complete loop.

And that's how it started.

And of course, the name The Raging Cajun sounded like a real good.

Typical regional name to call the coast.

The raging Cajun had the distinction of being the most expensive ride billed at the beach.

Over $1,000,000 Even though rides were an essential part of any beach visit, there was another important activity.

You can go out on to the beach itself, and that was the way all the boys and girls met each other.

You'd go out to the beach to see who the new guys were.

And when I was in high school, they had the Navy station was close to the beach, and all the young Navy guys used to come out there.

I got a job working at the ice cream.

It was a soft ice cream, used to make a twirl and there was an Italian fella was the boss.

And every time a nice looking young lady would come to the stand, I would put an extra twirl on it.

It was a little bigger than it's supposed to be.

And he would say, age races.

You know that young lady that you just gave a little extra ice cream?

Ice cream to?

Why you gave her an extra ice cream?

I said, Well, Mr. Joe said, That's a cousin of mine.

And he said, You know, I notice that all of your cousins are girls.

You don't have any boy cousin.

I said, No, I really don't have any boy cousin.

I have nothing but girl cousins.

That's where a lot of my romantic interludes were in the parking lot.

And we could also go there and meet girls, too, you know, from different neighborhoods.

We had a, you know, tunnel of love or whatever it was called there.

And you could ride through there in the dark and these things would jump out at you, but then the girls would have to grab you and you could make out in there.

So we had we had a number of weddings.

We had a wedding in the water in the way wedding of the waves the wedding on the high wire where the ladies went up there in full, full dresses.

I was I was biting my nails that they would not trip, but they were they were professional people.

In fact, it was a couple who were in the act that got married right before the beach closed.

Some longtime beachgoers decided to mount their own final tribute.

The last one was this incredible event that took place there September 24th, 1983.

And it's when the artists from who were affiliated in one way or another with a contemporary art center took over the beach for that evening.

At the end, when they did the fireworks, there weren't too many people out on the beach.

And and so it had this sort of abandoned feel to it.

And so whenever there was an explosion, everything on the beach turned red or green and it was very eerie how it would be dark and then all of a sudden things would be lit with, with this color.

And, and then the fireworks ended and and somehow I don't know how it happened.

This collective movement of people shouted one more time and lo and behold, they started up again.

And it was clearly an ending though.

Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park is gone.

There is an annual fund raiser at the side of the beach.

It's organized by the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

And is called back to the beach fittingly, proceeds go towards improving the lake, whose shoreline is no longer enlivened by people gathering at the beach the condominium development that was to replace the amusement park never got off the ground, and future plans for the beach site include the University of New Orleans Research and Technology Park, along with the D-Day Museum.

But a tiny, though meaningful remnant of the beach is on view at a park in the suburbs in Canada.

The top of the zebras track can be a reminder of the beaches, ups and downs from 1954 to 64.

During a time of segregation, the city's black community experience at seaside rides at an amusement park called Lincoln Beach.

It was set on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain along Hayne Boulevard in eastern New Orleans.

Lincoln Beach was an adventure at that time.

It took forever and a day to get to Lincoln Beach.

Quite often the mothers would take the children via bus service to Lincoln Beach.

If you missed the bus, the Heinz bus you made, it may take you 2 hours to get there.

Each way, possibly there was somewhat of a an underpass.

You went under a train trestle, you came in, you paid at Mission built by the Orleans Parish Levee Board.

Lincoln Beach consisted of the usual games and amusement rides along with a restaurant complex.

But the pools were the biggest draw.

There were not many pools that blacks could really have access to during that period.

And Lincoln Beach, if you attempted to to to learn to swim, the swimming lessons were done at Lincoln Beach it was definitely the only area that we really had for swimming.

The pool size and design were so popular that a pool built later at Pontchartrain Beach was modeled after it.

Local and nationally known music acts performed at Lincoln Beach on a regular basis.

One Grammy Award winning new Orleans musician performed there, but not the show you'd expect to see.

I used to go for the rides, and during that time, even though I was recording a lot, I was a part of a trampoline and dove and show, and we used to put on diving shows out there off the high board.

I love Lincoln Beach's fond memories in addition to those memories, what's left of Lincoln Beach, it closed in 1964 shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill.

A store sign across the street bears the beaches name.

This footage shows the beach 20 years after it closed giving little hint of the enjoyment it provided for a decade, a decade of great social change.

As integration became the law, Lincoln Beach was no longer needed.

The sign that pointed to the beach parking lot is a rusty reminder of the long ride to Lincoln Beach and of the bus that had reached its destination We go to the Pelican Stadium and sit on a bench and talk to the play and listen to the play as in the no my mouth.

Unless they ask you a question.

But I think I used to think that was like dying and going to heaven to be a park and a doubleheader.

You know, the Pelicans playing a doubleheader Yeah.

It was the city's premier ballpark on the southeast corner of Carrollton and Tulane Avenues for 42 years.

It was the home of the New Orleans Pelicans, a minor league professional baseball team born in the 1880s and lasting up into the late 1950s.

The Pels played in the Southern Association of the Minor Leagues.

What is it.

Minor are some of the memories made there by a team that in its history won a total of 13 pennants but gradually limped out of existence.

I would drop over the side of the bleachers in behind the foul line and a right field fence and when the visiting team not the Pelicans but the visiting team would go out to take batting practice and they only carried 18 men.

So the pitchers had to throw the ball back in and they wanted to stay in their arms.

So I would get in in between them and where the bad bad practices take and throw the ball in for them.

And when they would go towards that dugout I would walk with them like I'm a ball player and that's I'm thinking here I am in civilian clothes a kid and I pretend I'm a ball player.

Hopefully nobody catches me.

The stadium was originally called Heinemann Park after team and Stadium owner Alexander Julius Heinemann, who had grown up working for the Pelicans in 1915.

He had moved by mule the grandstands from an earlier stadium down Carrollton Avenue to the Tulane Avenue site.

The last 30 years of Pelicans stadiums, history is vivid in the memories of two brothers who grew up only a few blocks from the ballpark.

WWL TV's Phil Johnson and his brother John, a retired New Orleans policeman, spent many a day at the park.

That was a playground.

I mean, we played ball inside the ballpark.

The kids New Orleans would be there wasn't a game.

Yeah.

Oh yeah when about when they were out of town.

When the team was out of town.

Yeah we could play and I could remember that we could play and we could play on the infield.

And if they would make us play on the outfield, we use the scoreboard as a backstop.

Yeah.

And use the numbers for bases.

They tell us he told us, you know, don't play on the infield.

He cut it up when I wouldn't want that.

But one of our one of our guys was the ball boy for the Pelicans.

He would bring the new balls to the umpires and things like that.

So he managed to keep it out for himself that we played with as good a baseball as the Pelicans did.

Oh yeah.

We ran out of ball John became the field announcer for the Pelicans, and Phil covered games while working for the Old Item newspaper.

Today, the Johnson Brothers and other Pelican fans still hang out at the home played in across the street from where Pelican Stadium stood.

The home plate was the place where the players would have lunch before games and beers after some of the guys at the home played still remember the team and the ballpark?

Proprietor Clem Lehrman has it in his blood.

Bio command used to be the public address announcer before they had electricity in Pelican Stadium.

We used to do it with a bullhorn Marcus Lou's played ball for the Pelicans.

My daddy played semi-pro ball.

I was born right across the street from Pelican Stadium.

At 40, 41.

My mother used to take bets on the game.

Everybody used to bet on the game just like that.

Big Red Bull Momma used to work the so the uniforms for the players, you know, they slide in first, the second pay the uniforms and all the kids around the neighborhood.

We just all worked.

Oh, yeah.

When we got to the ballpark and even we could smell the peanuts, roast them, and Mr. Jack used to Rose.

He's peanuts, right?

Between the white grandstand and a colored bleachers.

And when you walk into the ballpark now I'm taking some block away.

Rose It was a good place to see a game because you felt like you were close to the players and work.

The crowd wasn't too big.

Sometimes you hear them yelling, you know, some things to each other, like, let's get going here, or that's a good play, or whatever the case might be.

The glory days for the Pelicans was in the 1920s and thirties under manager Larry Gilbert's leadership.

The team won five pennants in their heyday.

The Pels drew between ten and 12,000 fans per game through the years.

The Pelicans were a farm club for various major league teams, including the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Some of the big league squads also played exhibition games in the stadium Pelican Stadium had one of the largest playing fields in the country.

I hit one and left center field, which would have been a home run, I guess in almost any ballpark.

And the field and the country.

But this one was a longer elliptical than I ever saw, and I caught all of this.

White and blue was during the my we were playing the Dodgers made a sensational catch out there and prompted Joe McCarthy to yell over at Leo DeRosa, who was managing the other team and saying, Hey, hold up the game.

He said, Wait until your ball player comes back in the field.

How the stadium looked is preserved in this 1932 film of a local team called the Veteran Papoose, which played in the American Legion Baseball League here are scenes of the Pelicans playing in the early 1950s among the pelicans stars during the latter years of the team's existence was Al Flair who had a definite flair for hitting home runs hitting 24 in 1947 sometimes there would be bands in the stands occasionally to the dismay of the umpires.

But they used to have the three umpires that would walk out on the field to set up everything for the day and rolling around or whatever has to come off one Sunday afternoon the band would play Three Blind Mice probably wouldn't allow that today, but there was plenty of people working in the ballpark and their fathers worked in the ballpark and their sons worked in the ballpark.

It's marvelous.

Once I grew up and got a little smart, I stopped selling peanuts and went up on the roof and I was the foul ball expert at the time.

They had a foul ball in the roof.

I go get it, throw it back down.

11, a very difficult substitute announcer By the late fifties, minor league ball was on the decline.

The Pelicans were on their way out, and the land that the stadium sat on was seen as being more valuable for some other commercial enterprise.

It would serve as the site for the Falcon Blue Hotel and is now a storage facility the last general manager of the Pelicans was Vincent Rizzo.

He still lives just a few blocks away from where the stadium stood as the worst feeling I've ever had in my life.

That's true.

I believe I really did cry to Booth when I saw it.

That turned it down.

Well, my whole life I never wanted to have a place in my life at that even though there's no longer evidence of a ballpark across the street to people such as the Johnson Brothers and the Liebermans.

That corner on Tulane and Carrollton Avenues will always be where a team called the Pelicans had its nest I think the neighborhood theater was a social club for every neighborhood.

We met all of our friends in the theater even though my father operated the theater, I was like all the rest of the kids.

And on Friday night, Saturday matinee, we'd all meet, and it was it was predesigned to say, OK, we'll see you at the show Saturday.

OK, which show you're going to go to?

The Imperial, the Bell, the Carrollton.

And we'd arranged to meet there it's only fitting that Rene Bruner enjoys playing the organ at the Sanger Theater downtown.

His family has been involved in the movie theater business in New Orleans since the early 1900s.

Bruner still operates the Joy Theater and runs what used to be the low state where mostly concerts are held nowadays.

But it's those early days in the neighborhoods that he really enjoys talking about some of the early theaters, what converted stores and converted houses the Arcade Theater with a theater.

They bought several houses and one in the center they couldn't get, so they had an entrance to the right of a house, an entrance to the left of the house, and the theater was in the back.

That's why they called it the arcade, because you walk through a long arcade to get to the theater according to Bruni, seating capacity in an average New Orleans neighborhood, movie theater ranged from 700 to 1200.

Imagine the challenge of cooling such spaces on a hot summer night.

I can remember the fans that we had in the theater, what, about 12 feet high and were operated by 12 or 15 or 20 horsepower motors that blew a gale of wind through the theater.

And again, remember that we're in New Orleans, so the temperature with the wind was the outside temperature.

If it was 92 degrees outside, we were blowing 92 degree air throughout the theater in the 1920s and thirties.

Movies weren't the only attraction at the Neighborhood Picture Show the neighborhood theaters at the Imperial, but throughout the city had various types of stage presentations we had Bathing Beauty Contest and we'd have local talent and some of the local talent that we had at the Imperial became national.

The one I can think of the most is Connie Boswell.

Connie Boswell appeared on the stage at The Imperial as part of the Boswell Sisters.

There were three sisters.

Connie is the one that became nationally famous, but they did start out on the stage at the Imperial in the twenties, thirties and forties.

Going to the movies met more than just seeing a film.

An empty popcorn box wasn't the only thing you might leave the theater with we gave away turkeys and incidentally, that live turkeys.

And that's one of the horrors of my memory of the of the business I had to handle the turkeys and I was deathly afraid of live turkeys.

And on more than one occasion, the turkey got away from me and I was chasing a turkey down the street among the many families involved in the local movie theater business was one named Lazarus.

This is Lazarus with an important person in the motion picture industry, the lives of family operated theaters in New Orleans.

And they would only name a theater that began with a sea that they built The Carver, the Circle.

They had a theater on Canal Street called the Center.

They had on Rampart Street a theater called The Cinema, and another one called The Crown.

And one day I asked Mr. Rogers, I said, What's the significance?

And she said to me, Never mind the significance, that young man.

But any theaters that the library's own will always begin with the letter C, A.J Stevens worked in one of the Lazarus owned theaters, started off as a do everything type of fella sweep the floor got a little promotion, started to do the popcorn, make the popcorn.

We used to have girlfriends and you'd have one girlfriend on the first floor and you'd have one girlfriend on the second floor, and you'd go sit with the one on the first floor for a little while.

And then you go up and you sit with the one on the second floor and you'd have two girlfriends they they didn't know this because you had them on different floors.

And we all worked it together, you know, protected the, you know, like so and so as leaving.

OK, well, I'll go talk to the one upstairs until she leaves and then he won't cross parts for a city known for its devil may care attitude, sometimes it actually cared in a different way.

Holy Week was a very very solemn week in the theaters.

And let me go back was first of all on Good Friday.

The theater always closed.

We would not open the theater on Good Friday.

And then on Holy Thursday, the only picture that we would run year after year was the passion play, the life of Christ one of the fancier neighborhood theaters was the Carver.

Carver Theater was a very modern theater and it's very lore is that Carver Theater had 1200 seats and it was built at the time, and the term then was exclusively for colored people.

We would not admit white people.

They were barred from the theater until the Civil Rights Act changed things.

And then everyone was admitted.

Jack Stewart grew up in Uptown New Orleans and had his own favorite movie, has the Fine Arts.

It was kind of a cross between classical and Spanish, sort of maybe Romanesque architecture.

Sort of a kind of a beaux arts hodgepodge.

And the Fine Arts was the one that we could we could walk to.

I don't think anybody ever drove to the neighborhood theater which was the reason why we had so many neighborhood theaters in New Orleans, because there was a neighborhood theater and walking distance of everybody's home we could go to the Napoleon, which was on Napoleon Avenue across from Saint Stephen's Church or the Britannia, which is still there.

You could go to the National that was on magazine Street or the the Tivoli, which was out on Washington, which is now the Rhodes Funeral Home.

If you call that the Tivoli, then you call the other one the Reveille but if you call that the Tivoli, you call the other one the Reveille The DePaul in theater bore the name of the street on which it was located in 1938.

After it was remodeled, its slogan proclaimed the theater to be as new as television.

The technical innovation it compared itself to would make its way to New Orleans for another decade, therefore delaying any distracting forces it might have upon the local cinema another uptown theater was the Coliseum.

Today, movies are no longer shown, but it has been converted so that films are often shot there.

What's now a production studio and then there were the area drive ins with names such as The Dew, or the airline, which was named for the highway in which it was located.

And The Sky View, a name which reminded us that we may be at the movies, but we were still under the stars the period of the thirties was the greatest number of neighborhood theaters.

Theaters were being constructed.

World War Two stopped the construction of neighborhood theaters.

But I would suspect that the maximum number of theaters in existence to New Orleans was during the years 39, 40 and 41 then after World War Two, unfortunately, was the decline of the neighborhood theaters but what hasn't declined is our memories of the local movie houses.

We could see the world on a screen without having to leave our neighborhood it was a wide avenue.

It reminded me very much of Esplanade almost as if it wore a park environment.

If you walked the neutral ground or as the rest of the country would say, the median up until the mid-19th sixties and North Claiborne Avenue was the gathering place for the Seventh Ward and Treme neighborhoods.

What set the avenue apart from other thoroughfares were the rows of oak trees lining the neutral ground.

North Claiborne was full of beautiful trees, and all year round it was a haven for people to hang and have a good time.

It was just a wonderful place to be.

And there were many houses and places of business lined up on each side.

North Claiborne's served as almost a front yard for the neighborhood, a neighborhood that included both white and black families.

But by the mid-sixties, what made it special was gone.

Much of it was destroyed by an elevated expressway Claiborne Avenue.

For a young black person growing up in New Orleans, was the center of of entertainment, of business shopping.

It was an area that that allowed people to come together for holidays, especially the many festivals of parades that New Orleanians seemed to enjoy.

And first among those festivals, especially for the black community, was Mardi Gras.

It became a picnic.

The families would would get out early and I guess stake your spot or your space.

And really you didn't have to go much further than that because you saw everyone.

You saw everything.

You saw all of the costumes, the parades and the people coming and going and and that's what we knew and we understood, you know, for for Mardi Gras.

And we enjoyed that.

Mardi Gras morning would probably start at about six between six and seven in the morning.

You would hear some of the older people yelling in the neighborhood that here come the Indians there's something about the sunrise.

And when you could see these big feathers coming down the street and it's early morning, there's something about the waking of this day and these Indians that the first thing that you can see them in the morning, they control the streets, they control the traffic, they control the crowds.

And they were so grand and marvelous in their costumes.

You know, everybody stood back and just looked at them and let them take over the street the Indians would come from way downtown and meet the Indians uptown.

And I might say sometimes they'd get into quite a humbug, but they stopped knocking each other out and start knocking them dead with needles and thread, we might say begin to address each other and that made it even more special.

Even though the trees are gone, some of the cultural traits of the neighborhood have remained, including Mardi Gras, Indian tribes during the Depression, there was still room for a good time.

On Carnival Day in the Seventh Ward, people did not do a lot of masking they dressed up and they wore the fine suits, the spring suit, and you were dressed up and you walked up and down the neutral grounds.

Then some of the people along the way had open houses and people would go in, have a drink, maybe have a hot dog or a ham or something.

But there were still stalls all along Claiborne Avenue.

They would sell pralines.

They would be frying fish on their furnaces.

There, and chicken and all kinds of food among the costume groups out on Carnival Day were ladies who called themselves the baby dolls, as shown in this 1933 photograph by photographer Bradley Smith that was a no no for good Creoles to even think about a baby doll outfit.

You know the baby dolls usually followed the Indians and they were dressed in satin and they all dressed the like and they danced behind the Indians more or less another familiar sight on Claiborne, especially in earlier years, were men dressed in costumes bound to scare as seen in photos by Michael P Smith a longtime chronicler of such groups.

I can remember being frightened by the skeletons at that time.

It seemed like skeletons was the thing to be in the costumes that they they had very huge heads.

And then the the other part of the costume was just very realistic, looking like the bones of the skeleton.

And as a child, you know, it frightened them.

They were very mystery yes.

But one thing I don't know, other times of the year who the skeleton men were, they'd come out for that time.

And one more appearance, a shortly after Mardi Gras, and then we wouldn't see them again.

And I was a quite a young guy at that time.

I just remember the scene of the Skeleton Men, of which we were glad to see.

But I don't know who they were.

Maybe they were real skeletons.

I don't know.

Very welcome.

Was the appearance of the mock monarch silly part of his meander ing route included a visit to his subjects who lined up to see him.

One Claiborne's but there were other activities that took place on the street that were more solemn.

I do recall the the jazz bands playing for for some of the funerals all the major black mortuaries were located.

Not all, but most were located on Claiborne Avenue or right off of Claiborne Avenue.

The sad day would come when the trees were bulldozed, a few of which were relocated to other areas in the city.

North Claiborne fell victim to an aggressive federal highway program in the 1960s.

Oh, it was terrible.

I can remember them cutting down the trees and and it was North Claiborne was kind of it was, it was different than all the other neutral grounds because it starting on Canal Street you had four rows of trees for breast that went all the way to a legion fields and it was a very different than any of the neutral grounds.

I remember none of the neutral grounds had those rows of trees like that the elevated expressway erased all but a patch of green, leaving only a glimpse at what once was surprisingly, one person's childhood memory of the Oaks is less than nostalgic.

I remember the caterpillars for maybe that was one thing.

Why was maybe one reason why I was happy that the trees were taken down.

The caterpillars at the time would just hang like curtains.

And that was one.

My fear is going to school, crossing Claiborne Avenue and how to get across there without the caterpillars just falling on you because they hung like curtains.

They were so thick and you would run when you got to leave it at that.

But grown up memories prevail.

A lot of trees, a lot of pretty oak trees and a lot of green space underneath there was really nice.

And, you know, that happened to us so quick.

I don't think people there knew what was happening to them when they lost all of that.

But I guess you lose some things for progress.

I think that was a major concern of a lot of people.

What happened to the to the area and what would happen to the neighborhood and the traditions that had developed a few years after the elevated expressway had been built, a black community organization called the Tambourine and Fan Club lobbied the city and state for a study on ways to enhance the space under the expressway.

Unfortunately, recommendations made in the study were never implemented.

The Circle Grocery, a landmark on the street, has been in business for over half a century and still survive.

Businesses have closed, but others have opened with the hope that the street will improve.

A few of the grand homes that line the street remain some in better shape than others.

Yet the impact of the expressway continues to be felt.

It changed everything.

That whole area just went so much, you know, the houses are not the same.

Nothing is the same.

It seems to me they could have maybe put it someplace else.

I don't know if they had much of a choice.

I really don't know.

It was either Claiborne Avenue because of the width or possibly destroying homes.

So it was a choice that had to be made just as part of North Claiborne was raised to make way for an expressway, another part of the same road system, the Pontchartrain Expressway stretches over the side of one of the city's all time ambitious projects in New Basin Canal, an earlier waterway.

The Carondelet Canal had used by U.S. John to link the city with the lake.

The New Basin Canal took a different route, the almost six mile long canal link.

The city's central business district with Lake Pontchartrain, with the new Basin Canal meant to New Orleans, was a valuable shipping artery, enabling building materials and produce to be shipped into a section of the city that was rapidly developing.

The canal was built in the 1830s.

Over a century later, a newspaper reporter referred to its construction as the birth of commerce and the death of men with slaves considered by their masters too valuable to be used to plow through six miles of swamp the work went mostly to Irish immigrants who were offered a dollar a day.

The cypress filled swamps turned out to be full of mosquitoes carrying cholera and yellow fever.

Estimates of how many workers died while building the canal range from 8000 to 30,000 with picks and shovels.

The workers achieved an engineering marvel.

The canal gave reason for New Orleans being described as the Venice of the New World, an intricate, open canal system ran through the city.

The New Basin Canal was the real dividing line between Uptown and the rest of the city, even though the streets changed from north to south and Canal Street.

Really everything changed at the new Basin Canal.

Schooners, tugboats and barges were a common sight along the canal than in most sections was only six feet deep.

At the Rampart Street docks, customers would shop for produce alongside the canal.

A few miles down was Pelican Stadium.

See the watermelon lovers going by, bringing goods downtown.

We were right off of the Yankees.

Go on to what they had the sand and the shells and stuff, and the big barges would come in with the rocks in the sand and on anger about filth over depressed banks.

We struck down a right field line.

We could see the base and you could see this this little tugboat pushing these these barges and they just kind of picked up the shells and picked up watermelons.

That's just the shells that people use for paving treads and shells that were dredged up out of the lake.

Everybody use shells for their driveways and and everything it was fun.

There were all these bridges across and every bridge was a little bit different.

And they had a really neat train bridge where the behind Metairie Cemetery which they called Black Bridge, was it was painted black and it was real long.

And this whole bridge would just hit some kind of a strange mechanism, like a spool or something on the back of it.

And it would a whole bridge would just kind of open like that and closed while the bridges may have held some fascination, the water caused some concern.

One of the things my momma used to tell me, don't you go play on a base.

And I used to go play on it every summer every summer we lose somebody.

Oh, yeah, it would drown in the canal.

Quite a few people drowned in that one.

At least one a summer would lose a friend either here or the old railroad bridge.

Further down, the mother of a childhood friend would issue a strong warning to her husband.

So Joe would come pick up the two kids, Charlie and Eddie, take them swimming.

So when I leave my cell, that's Kwame's mama.

And that was her brother.

I know the way she said Joe if you don't bring them kids home, I'm back with you.

You better not come by tomorrow.

But they claim that he taught them how to swim a room and destroy him in the in the bay.

If I could get out of here, man, a lot of kids would go jump in a canal and take a little swim.

It wasn't I wide.

I think I asked someone recently trying to refresh my memory, and he said it was only about 60 feet wide.

And, you know, I related to baseball.

I said, Well, that's between Home and Pitcher's Mound.

And I think it was a little further than that.

An annual sight on the canal was the arrival by tugboat of the Zulu King on Carnival Day in this rare footage from 1928 he is disembarking and then taking his place on a float that will carry him around town the canal was filled in completely by the mid 1950s highways and railroads had rendered it obsolete what's left of the new Basin Canal is near Lake Pontchartrain.

A short stretch by the yacht harbor is all that remains nearby is a tribute to those who built the canal.

It is a monument to the Irish who, instead of improving their lives in their new country, lost them the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar is a reminder of the days when there were over 26 street railway lines that traveled through New Orleans it had to be almost the first day I moved here, which was back just before the desire line shut down.

I was in mid May of 1948 and I just thought I found the trolley headed on.

I moved.

Yeah.

Everywhere I look there were streetcars, every different direction, all different kinds of I'd never seen so many streetcars at one time in one place, and I just couldn't believe that I was lucky enough to live here.

So if you really knew how to use a transfer system, which a lot of people did you could ride around the whole city, go shopping, go grocery shopping for the French market, still come home on the same $0.07 on the front of each streetcar was the destination box giving the names of the streets or neighborhoods.

The lines ran through names such as Gentilly, Magazine, City Park, Kenner and Saint Claude.

On some days, the Saint Claude Line would pick up passengers of a different kind.

The slaughterhouse there that men used to buy the calves and cows, and they put them on the the longitudes seat.

A lot of them had bought them start kind of blinking under the longitude.

See, longitude.

That's the long love seat they call it.

Some people call it the love seat, the lion under there, and they'd give it a nipple to hold on to and leave it there till they got off in the morning.

You'd see them getting off the car in the morning.

If you were on roll call, would a calf going mad, man, did a home come in to put it in the trunk of their car?

Those were the days.

In addition to the conductors, there were others who were equally enterprising regarding the streetcar.

We used to take pennies and go put pennies on the track and the streetcar would roll over and it was smash the pennies.

And then we'd sell the smash pennies for a nickel.

People would look for souvenirs operating the desire streetcar line through the narrow streets of the French Quarter created its own special challenges.

A brief pinhole who worked on the streetcars during the war years recalls a problem with a streetcar caused along her Bourbon Street route.

They had this man, Sam, was his name, and he had these ball games where you'd pitch balls like Pontchartrain Beach to get stuffed animals.

And when you go through there, if you're a new operator or a new conduct or voter out on a call, he'd come running out and say, Look, you're on our court tonight.

Please go through here slow and I'll buy you lunch, coffee, anything you all want.

He said.

Because when that streetcar comes through here on 8.0, how many points you all have, he said.

It vibrates them up bottles and they fall when they hit Harlem Fall.

And I've given animals away that they really not knocking down the bottles but the 1920s was the peak period of street rail service, with 225 miles of track on the streets of New Orleans.

In this footage from the early twenties, downtown New Orleans was filled with streetcars converging from all over the city by the early forties, there were only 100 miles left.

Canal Street, however, remained a vibrant hub.

Even ten years later, if you were trying to cross the, you know, get from one side of Canal Street, if he got off the streetcar and you trying to go to Woolworth's or something, you just walked over the streetcar track after streetcar track.

It was just seemed like they were streetcar tracks everywhere.

As a little kid, you and trying to be careful you didn't trip in and stumble and all, but they were all over everywhere.

Perhaps most missed is the line that ran up and down New Orleans Main Street.

The actual numbers of cars that once ran on the canal streetcar line may seem surprising today.

Approximately 40 to 50.

There were a little bit more during rush hour when the West End line was in operation because it used all of Canal Street to get out to West End.

They ran on the very close headway, like about 90 seconds and as fast as you could take a picture, there was another car there.

So it was it was to my mind, it was really exciting.

In those days.

For comparison, today there are 35 street cars on the Saint Charles line.

Streetcar conductors would sometimes have some unexpected excitement.

The two lane line we call the ambulance line because many times the ladies go into Charity Hospital to have their babies they would get maybe around if it was coming down Saratoga to Tulane, then they'd stop right at the hospital, but they'd have to hurry up, pull the shades down because the baby was always delivered.

So then they'd take them to Charity Hospital.

After the baby was born on the car.

The conductors used to say their wives said they had more children named after them outside the house than they had inside the house.

Name for and then there was the West End line that took riders along the New Basin Canal and out to Lake Pontchartrain.

But this was really a quite a rod, a really used to enjoy it, but it was the most relaxing thing to get on that street canal thing, which is Raglan, Raglan, Raglan.

And you'd be dozing off, you grab yourself, woo!

Because the winder is about up to your leg and you had to watch it.

You didn't fall out the window.

This lady got on she had nice, beautiful black hair and a nice blouse and slacks, and she had a little makeup kit and a hand.

And I said, Good morning, how are you?

And I said, A very attractive lady to be out this out at night by yourself, just trying to make conversation when we get to the end of the line of conduct, the mode of catering.

You said, Marie, I know you're going to be a nun damn it.

You said you couldn't see.

That was a man.

That's a female impersonator from the club out there.

By 1953 only the Saint Charles, the Canal Street lines were left.

11 years later, the Canal Line was removed that removal remains a vivid memory of the song.

I've got an interesting photograph that was taken, I think the day before the canal lines last run.

This was some of the board of directors of Cause Desire and the group that that unsuccessfully tried to save the Canal Street line I am right here on the and this this edge right here with a bow tie on and a crewcut is a 1964 the last rod was all night on, on May the 30th and then I got two transfers and these are the real long transfers, they're all the way down to the bottom of the day.

And I got them autographed by the, the motorman and the conductor Ji Callahan and Emmitt Ford.

The ride was kind of interesting because we got part of the way down Canal Street and they turn the power off and the street costs that they're dead.

And I had to go back up on the pole and turn the they were they were frantically cutting down the wire and everything as fast as they could behind the street car.

And they left us in one spot that had no power.

And they turn the go up on this pole and turn the power back on and let the streetcar continue.

And then it went to the barn.

And as it was going in the barn, it was interesting.

The the trolley they had they had just put on a new modern facade on the canal barn for the busses.

And the trolley pole jumped off the car and hit the barn and made arks and sparks all over the new front Stewart looks forward to the planned return of the canal streetcar line and is saving what he wore in the last ride in 1964 for a special reason.

I still have the white linen suit.

I'm determined that I'm going to wear it on the on the first run when they put streetcars back on a canal I'm gonna wear the same suit a ride on the Canal Street car, a ride on the Zephyr, a boat ride on the new basin canal.

Seeing the Pelicans play ball seeing the Mardi Gras Indians on tree lined Claiborne or just going to the neighborhood show with hope.

You've enjoyed looking back to the New Orleans that was just remember that today's experiences of the New Orleans that was of the future.

Savor them while you can.