You're standing next to the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world. It's been clattering down these oak-lined tracks since eighteen thirty-five — before the Civil War, before the telegraph, before anyone had figured out whether tomatoes were poisonous. And it costs a dollar twenty-five.
These olive-green cars are called Perley Thomas streetcars — named after a Canadian farm boy who grew up to build them in a former ice factory. His company eventually pivoted to school buses, and Thomas Built Buses is still around today. Still making the yellow buses kids ride to school in. The company that built these hundred-year-old streetcars never went away.
And neither did the cars. The mechanics who keep them running work out of the Carrollton Streetcar Barn — a building from the eighteen forties. They fabricate replacement parts by hand using antique tools, for cars that haven't been manufactured in a century. And every time a streetcar comes back from a major overhaul, they
ring the original eighteen thirty-five bell that hung on the very first horse-drawn car. It's a tradition, and I think it's rather beautiful.
This line ended up in one of the most famous plays in American theater. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire while living half a block from a different streetcar — the Desire line on Royal Street. He could hear it through his window. And Blanc
