by Wesley Harris
If you have been aggravated by the seemingly endless construction on Ruston’s Monroe Street, you would have been even more frustrated trying to drive it for much of the 20th century.
Seems like it has been under construction for several years and when I think about it, it has. For the first time ever, Monroe Street will be open from the I-20 Service Road all the way to Line Avenue behind the neighborhood Walmart.
I can recall when Monroe Street was completely blocked at the railroad tracks. No way to use it to get from one side of Ruston to the other. The train depot that sat in the middle of the street was a fascinating place to us kids.
Fortunately, the newly designed street has fewer traffic lights than the other major north-south thoroughfares of Trenton Street and Vienna Street, providing an easy drive across the city.
As Ruston was being planned, its streets were mapped out around the east-west railroad in a plan of perfect symmetry. Streets met at right angles. The simple grid pattern of what is now the downtown historic district avoided curves. But the original straight north-south layout of Monroe Street eventually developed a noticeable curve due to the coming of a second railroad.
If you were driving through downtown from the early 1900s until the 1960s, you wouldn’t have used Monroe Street. After the Arkansas Southern Railway, later known as the Rock Island, came through Ruston in 1901, numerous spurs were laid off the main track to warehouses and loading docks located on either side of Monroe Street.
For years, most of Monroe Street was completely blocked to vehicular traffic from what is now the rear of the Ruston Civic Center to the rear parking lot of First Baptist Church. The spurs that split off its main rail line that ran parallel to Monroe Street covered what was intended to be the street itself.
The Rock Island even built a freight depot in the middle of Monroe Street, and the passenger depot shared with the east-west Vicksburg, Shreveport and Pacific sat right in the middle of the intersection of Park Avenue and Monroe Street.
That meant no rail crossing existed on Monroe Street to reach the other side of town.
By the 1960s, citizens yearned for another crossing over the east-west tracks, then the Illinois Central Railroad, to relieve traffic on Trenton and Vienna Streets which served as routes for both U.S. 167 and the east-west transcontinental U.S. 80. At the time Maple Street only ran from West California Avenue to Barnett Springs Road and Homer Street came to a dead end on both sides of the Illinois Central tracks.
In 1965, a plan was developed to reopen Monroe Street from West Florida Avenue to West Louisiana Avenue.
The first step was demolishing the beautiful red brick passenger depot with its clay tile roof. The building was one of many from Ruston’s earliest days to be lost to “progress.”
Survey and design of the new roadway took time. The city wanted the Rock Island to move its freight depot at the corner of West Mississippi Avenue so the roadway could be straightened to its original path. The railroad rejected the city’s request. The reworked Monroe Street would require a bit of a curve around the building which is now an Origin Bank branch.
A newspaper publisher said of the proposed street work, “Completion of the street and [the free city] parking lot project could well be one of the major accomplishments of this City administration and should be a boon to Ruston for many years to come. Convenience of travel for the growing automobile population at Louisiana Tech and for persons moving in the downtown area will be greatly enlarged.”
Within a few years, with the passenger depot, spurs, and other impediments removed, the street reopened its entire length for the first time in decades.
All the warehouses that lined Monroe are gone today. And except for a little bend in the road to detour around the freight depot, it’s a straight shot from the Interstate to the south side of Ruston.
