Bows of Holly

A Streetcar Centennial

Even streetcars wear holly during December. The Regional Transit Authority routinely fastens a bough to the top front of its trolleys. 

Those streetcars that travel along the St. Charles Avenue route, the green ones, have acquired an additional importance this time of the year. While Twelfth Night, January 6, is the last day of the Christmas season, only in New Orleans has that date become a cause of symbolic celebration. A whimsical group called the “Phunny Phorty Phellows” traditionally rides a streetcar on that evening to spread the word that with the passing of the holiday season, a new one begins – Carnival.

This year the fleet of green trolleys deserves special reverence for 2023 is its centennial. They are among the enduring stories on rails.

One of the most admirable, but overlooked, characters in the development of the New Orleans landscape was a design engineer with a passion for urban rail transportation, Perley A. Thomas. 

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Here the scene shifts to the unlikely destination of High Point, North Carolina. In 1910, Thomas began working for the Southern Car Company which specialized in light rail transportation. It was a burgeoning business as cities throughout the country were looking for better methods of public transit. Unable to beat the competition, Southern closed in 1916. Thomas acquired the company and named it the Perley A. Thomas Car Works, Inc.

His fledgling company built trolley cars for several locations, none as important as Louisiana where New Orleans Public Service (NOPSI) operated the public transit. By 1922, the company delivered 25 trolleys to NOPSI. Then by 1923, NOPSI would have accumulated 173 of the trolleys, which by then were commonly known as “streetcars.”

Streetcar lines would eventually spread throughout the city. A playwright who was working in a French Quarter apartment on a production he was going to call “The Poker Night” became fascinated by the neighborhood trollies, so much so that he changed the play’s title to “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The writer, Tennessee Williams, would describe the new name as “an ideal metaphor for the human condition.”

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In 1947, the play opened on Broadway. In 1951, it premiered as a movie. One of those cars from the 1923 fleet was number 922. It would be immortalized in the opening scene of the movie.

By the 1960s trolley lines were being replaced throughout the country by city buses which were not limited by track routes. They would, however, be later criticized for being too polluting. The last routes to survive in New Orleans were the Canal Street and St. Charles lines. Eventually the Canal Street service was closed too.

In 1972 Thomas’ heirs converted the company into one that specialized in buses. Its streetcar era was over, but not in New Orleans, where 35 of the olive green trolleys survive on the St. Charles line. New Orleans Public Service would become the caretaker of the old machines. Mechanics at the Willow Street carbarn, off of South Carrollton Avenue, still keep the Perley Thomases rolling.

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(One worker with a passion for the trolleys once revealed to me that a quirk of the machines was that “they had no roaches.” Despite the consumer trash left on the floors the sounds of medal wheels on a metal track kept the critters away.)

In 2004, after a 40-year absence, streetcars returned to Canal Street. They are red and have the same body shape as the Perley Thomases but they are completely different machines with a modern drive system, air conditioning and an automated announcement system calling out coming stops.

But nothing beats the charm of the Perley Thomas as it waddles past the oaks on St. Charles Avenue. Its temperature control is near perfect as achieved simply by opening and closing the windows at appropriate times.

There is cause for celebration that this year is the centennial of the green streetcars whose history includes a century of taking riders to Canal Street for Christmas shopping or to see the lights downtown. 

There must have been early karma that the color of the city’s streetcar lines would eventually be red and green. And that one night a year, the Carnival season would be waiting at the end of the line. 

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