Central City (New Orleans, Louisiana)

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The area closest to Saint Charles Avenue developed first, in the first half of the 19th Century, booming with the opening of the New Orleans & Carrollton Railway, which became the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar line. The opening of the New Basin Canal at the neighborhood's lower end contributed to the area's development as a center of commerce and a working class residential area, attracting many Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. After the American Civil War many African Americans from rural areas settled in this part of the city. By the 1870s, the urbanized area extended back to Claiborne Avenue.

Dryades Street in this area was a neighborhood commercial district by the 1830s, but gained greater importance in the first half of the 20th century, becoming the city's largest African American commercial district during the Jim Crow law era and a major hub for the Uptown African American community, overtaking the older South Rampart Street area in importance. At its height in the years after World War II, the Dryades Street district boasted over 200 businesses.

Dryades Street began a decline in the 1960s, which became a steep nose-dive by the 1980s. At the low point somewhere around 1990, blighted and vacant buildings predominated. The blighted area got city attention, and the old commercial section of Dryades Street was renamed after local civil rights activist Oretha Castle Haley. Projects to improve the neighborhood gradually saw fruit by the start of the 2000s.

A large part of Central City was above the flooding which devastated the majority of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005