Canal Street

This guide to Canal Street in New Orleans centers on the four-sided clock once bolted above D.H. Holmes, the dry-goods store an Ohio transplant opened here in 1849 that grew into the largest department store in the South, staffed by an army of clerks who set their shifts by it. You'll hear how streetcar riders and shoppers trusted that clock so completely that meeting underneath it became local shorthand, famous enough that novelist John Kennedy Toole sent Ignatius Reilly to wait there in A Confederacy of Dunces. Look up as you pass. The clock is still keeping the same job it always had.