Canal Street, New Orleans

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Canal Street is a major thoroughfare in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Canal Street, looking away from the river, 1920s

Forming the up-river boundary of the city's oldest neighborhood, the French Quarter (Vieux Carre), it formed the dividing line between the older French/Spanish Colonial era city and the newer American sector, the Central Business District.

The name of the avenue comes from a planned canal which was to connect the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, but it was never constructed. The wide median which was to contain the canal was referred to by early inhabitants as the "neutral ground," due to the animosities amongst culturally distant residents on separate sides of the avenue. The term is still used by New Orleanians to refer to all street medians.

One end of Canal Street is at the Mississippi River. Often called "The foot of Canal Street," at the riverfront the Canal Street Ferry connects to the old urban suburb of Algiers, Louisiana across the river. The other end is in Mid City New Orleans at a collection of cemeteries.

The street has three lanes of traffic in both directions, with a pair of streetcar and bus lanes in the center.

Canal Street is often said to be the widest roadway in America to be given the term street instead of a more prominent title of avenue or boulevard.

For more than a century, Canal Street was the main shopping district of Greater New Orleans. It long was home to a number of local department stores; some, such as Maison Blanche, Krauss, and D. H. Holmes survived into the 1980s, long after the old style main-street department stores of most other major U.S. cities. Such chains as Woolworth's, McCroy's and Kress were also on the street.

The world's first movie theater (that is, the first business devoted specifically to showing films for profit) was "Vitascope Hall", established on Canal Street in 1896. The hosted a number of theaters large and small through the 20th century. Two of the old movie palaces, the Sanger Theater and the State Palace Theater (formerly Lowe's State) survive, although now mostly as live performance venues.

For decades, the giant effigy of the character Mr. Bingle on the façade of the Maison Blanche building was a sign of the Christmas season.

Canal Street remains the hub of the city's mass transit system.