225BatonRouge.com

Ah, the infamous paper clip pier. This is an easy one. What’s harder to answer is why the bottoms of its arched metal columns are covered in the saccharine etchings of love-struck couples proclaiming forever—or at least until the new riverfront master plan sweeps them away—that “Josh loves Marianne.”

In 1987, then-Mayor Pat Screen commissioned Pete Clements to design a structure for the Delta Steamboat Company to land its three boats. “It was sorely needed,” says Davis Rhorer, executive director of the Downtown Development District. Officially titled the Riverfront Landing Facility, the steel and concrete pier was completed in 1990 just north of the USS Kidd.

But other than the Delta Queen, the Mississippi Queen and the American Queen that dock there, the landing has served mostly as a dimly-lit hotspot for teens going steady and a platform for drunken patriots to hurl beer bottles at the fireworks barge on the Fourth of July.

Thankfully, the Riverfront design team, led by Hargreaves & Associates, initiated its redesign work last month. The group includes Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and Remson Haley Architects. Designers are looking at the needs of the entire downtown waterfront and the issues the current facility or a new wharf would present. Rhorer expects initial planning, including public input, to be completed this summer.