Not Quite A Streetcar On Desire

New Orleans plans to spend up to $90 million to take streetcars downriver from the French Quarter, a working-class and Creole side of the Big Easy immortalized by Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

The city said it would build 2 1/2 miles of streetcar lines by the end of 2013 down Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue. A spur track would go down Elysian Fields Avenue, the street where Stanley and Stella Kowalski live in Williams' 1947 play.

New Orleans' fabled streetcars once stretched into every corner of this diverse city, but they eventually faded from the backstreets and were reduced in the early 1960s to a single line running past the mansions of St. Charles Avenue.