Canal Street (New Orleans, Louisiana)

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Canal Street is the widest roadway in America to be classified as a street, instead of the avenue or boulevard titles more typically appended to wide urban thoroughfares.

It acted as the dividing line between the older French/Spanish Colonial-era city and the newer American Sector, today's Central Business District.

The name of the avenue comes from a planned canal which was to have connected the Mississippi River to the Congo Square terminus of the Carondelet Canal, but was never constructed. The wide median earmarked for 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. Today the neutral ground has a pair of streetcar tracks running along the center.