Streetcars are an iconic image of New Orleans. Although only four streetcar lines still exist—St. Charles, Canal, Rampart, and Riverfront—they remain nostalgic vestiges of the city’s past, immortalized in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, and a number one item on tourist lists of things to do in the Crescent City.

From their origins in the 1830s as local railcars and horse or mule-drawn drawn cars, to its transition to electric powered streetcars in the 1890s, through the early twentieth century strikes, the battle over streetcar segregation, the replacement of many of the lines by buses in the mid-twentieth century, the creation of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority in 1979 to consolidate the previously privately-operated lines, and the restoration of the lines after Hurricane Katrina, streetcars have captured the public’s imagination, been important modes of transportation, and served as lenses to view the changing history of the city itself.