225BatonRouge.com

Across the street, beer cans litter the neighbor’s yard. A few blocks down, a graveyard of retired vehicles waits patiently for their next adventures in parts. A concrete pillar trembles beneath the weight of a toppling frame.

It’s an inauspicious drive through the back of Port Allen. There’s chipped paint, torn shingles, a rusty tire.

Then, out of nowhere, a fountain. A circular driveway. A red convertible sports car. And a three-story house with a newly painted white balcony, a swimming pool and a backyard hammock. It’s not the pool table, the Jacuzzi or even the elevator that make the house stand out among its neighbors.

It’s the stunning view.

Three years ago, Marion Coleman thought she would never move. Her late husband built her a dream house with a pond in a quaint neighborhood. But a business investment later, she was packing boxes and moving to a house that turned out to be even dreamier. She found herself living right on the Mississippi River, something Baton Rouge’s downtown investors are busy capitalizing on, something Baton Rouge residents are willing to pay $2 million a condo for.

But Coleman found one thrifty deal. The price tag for their million-dollar view: $251,000.

“You just sit here and watch the whole world go by,” Coleman says as she eases her way to the couch directly in front of a four-panel bay window.

She turns her head south, and a spectacular view of the Mississippi River Bridge rises up from another window. “You can check the traffic in the morning to see if you want to go anywhere.”

But why would anyone want to go anywhere after watching all the colors of the sunrise pour into a living room over a steaming cup of hazelnut coffee? You can’t. You have to wait for the sunsets.

“At night it is absolutely spectacular,” she says. So spectacular that the original owner didn’t install lights in the rooms on the third floor. “They didn’t need them. At night the lights from the city shine right into the third floor,” she says.

And then there’s the trees—or absence of them.

The late Willie Ray, a marine contractor who sold the Colemans the house a few years ago, knew exactly what he was doing when he built it with balconies on each floor. Lore has it that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confronted Ray about cutting down trees on the levee, but Ray denied it, claiming beavers got to them. “We do have beavers,” Michael Coleman says. He and his wife smile and gaze out the window at an unobstructed view of the downtown Baton Rouge.

“I wouldn’t move from here,” Marion Coleman surrenders. “You just can’t. You’ve got everything you want.”

A five-minute drive to the heart of downtown Baton Rouge, the house stands as an epitome to minivan-driving suburban soccer moms everywhere. The Colemans have a huge hill (better known as the levee) in their backyard for summer water slides. They have three floors of balconies to stuff friends and family for celebrations.

They’re living the high life on the other side of the tracks.

Three lots down, bricks line another circular driveway leading to a three-car garage. Freshly planted flowers lead up to a crystal chandelier. It doesn’t have a third floor or a million-dollar view, but someone else is finally catching on.