History Under the Streets!! Part 1

We stopped by again to get a better video of the corner of Youree Drive and Stratford Ave. where streetcar tracks were recently exposed during roadwork. It was cool because as we were taking pictures, we had three different cars, drive-by and yell out Twin Blends! How cool is that! LOL, they were probably all thinking “there’s those two crazy guys again going around looking for history!” I guess if that’s what we’re known as we will just have to accept it lol.

Many people do not know this, but not only are there old bricks underneath that section of Youree Drive, but there’s also Streetcar Tracks!! Here we go again, lol, you know how infatuated we are with Shreveport Streetcar History… We found out that streetcar tracks once ran from the corner of Kings Highway and Centenary Blvd. then behind the old Centenary Drug Store (home to the Plaza Café later) then crossed Silver Bayou (Bayou Pierre) between what is now the Centenary Baseball and Football fields, continuing down Stephenson (now Stratford Ave.), then turning south onto Youree Drive and ending at the old Broadmoor Drug Store (now the Broadmoor Shopping Center)! The photo we are holding is a picture of workers working on the Broadmoor Extension with the very streetcar that ran along the tracks we are looking at!

We found the original negative in the Thurman C. Smith Collection, scanned it in high resolution and used it here! (This photo has been used several times over the years in newspapers and a few books but no one has ever seen it in such a high resolution until now! It along with the rest of the Thurman C. Smith collection will soon be donated to the Northwest Louisiana Archives at LSUS).

A while back we posted pictures of the Broadmoor Drug from 1929 previously, but we never noticed that there was a streetcar parked to the right of the building! That got us curious and, after more research, we found a map that showed the path of the streetcar line that ran from Centenary at Kings Highway all the way down to the Broadmoor Drug! This is why we LOVE Broadmoor...it has so much amazing history!!!