The paddle steamboat in this film is the S.S. Capitol. It ran excursion cruises up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It was built in 1920 for Streckfus Steamers, Inc. and was scrapped in 1945 at St. Louis, Missouri. It also can be seen in Modern New Orleans (1940).
In 1940 when this short film was made, New Orleans had a population of 494,537. In the 2020 US census, the population of the city had dropped to 383,997, but the metro area population is 1,270,530.