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Alamo Motel

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Sandra Claiborne can’t forget The Alamo, although she wishes she could. And she’s not talking about San Antonio’s monument to American courage and sacrifice.

The Alamo Claiborne can’t forget is the 66-year-old Alamo Plaza Motel, the one at 4243 Florida Blvd., a few blocks west of North Foster Drive.

In May, Claiborne and a friend caught a bus up from New Orleans for a little R&R. They were looking for a brief respite from the post-Katrina craziness and a chance to drop some cash at one of the riverboat casinos. To save some bucks and to be close to the downtown action, Claiborne’s friend decided they would stay at The Alamo Plaza Motel.

Big mistake.

“It was horrible,” Claiborne says. “It was crawling with roaches.”

Everything in the room was stained and filthy, she says, including the bed.

Claiborne and her friend made their casino run, but there weren’t enough free watered-down cocktails in the world to make her forget where they had to sleep that night.

“By the time we came back the roaches were everywhere,” she recalls.

Claiborne spread newspaper across the mattress then lay down on top of it so she wouldn’t have to touch the bed. “I can’t believe they charge for those rooms.”

When it opened its doors nearly seven decades ago, The Alamo Plaza was a sparkling, cutting-edge slice of 20th century America, the free market’s nimble response to the growth of automobile travel. The Alamo chain boasted of Simmons furniture in every room and a Beautyrest mattress on every bed. Most rooms had telephones and televisions. The chain’s slogan was “Catering to those who care.”

Today, The Alamo Plaza in Baton Rouge is a roach-infested, crime-ridden destination where the police are called, on average, more than once a day all year long.

Built in 1941, Baton Rouge’s Alamo Plaza was part of a thriving motel chain that began in Waco, Texas. The brainchild of former used car salesman Lee Torrance, The Alamo brand was the first motel chain in America. Its business model was based on consistency. Guests got the same dependable service and clean rooms at every Alamo Plaza. Prior to the founding of The Alamo chain, roadside lodgings were mom-and-pop operations, where service and cleanliness were hit or miss.

At the time it was built, Baton Rouge’s Alamo Plaza was on the edge of town and Florida Street was only two lanes.

In their book The Motel in America (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1996), John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers devoted an entire chapter to The Alamo Plaza chain and explained the location of the one in Baton Rouge. “The Florida Street site,” the authors wrote, “was on an artery being considered for widening into a four-lane connector to the new Airline Highway.”

Sonny Calandro, 67, oldest of the Calandro brothers, remembers when the city limits stopped at Edison Street, alongside his family’s grocery store on Government Street. Back then, a new neighborhood known as Capital Heights offered suburban living.

Calandro also remembers The Alamo Plaza.

“It was a nice place ... one of the nicest places in Baton Rouge,” he says. “Businessmen used to stay there. Families used to stay there.” Next door to the motel was The Alamo Plaza Restaurant. “We used to go there for Sunday brunch.”

Beginning in the 1950s, the development of the interstate system left many of the nation’s long-established roadside businesses—gas stations, eateries and motels—in the dust as driving patterns shifted away from the older, slower highways and toward sleek, new superhighways. Spiffy chains like Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn sprang up along the new traffic corridors and motorists left behind older motels like The Alamo Plaza.

Rich Kummerlowe, a member of the board of directors of the Society for Commercial Archeology, studies roadside cultural landmarks. He even maintains a couple of Web sites devoted to The Alamo Plaza in Baton Rouge.

According to Kummerlowe, The Alamo’s decline into degeneracy began in the mid-1980s, when the family of the original owner sold the motel. But even then, the transformation was gradual.

“At first, it still seemed to attract clientele ... who were not down and out,” Kummerlowe says. “It still looked good and I think they still maintained a lot of their services.”

By the 1990s, however, the spirit of the original Alamo was gone. The new owners had painted the façade pink, filled in the swimming pool, boxed in the front desk with bulletproof glass, and sealed off the walkways between the buildings.

Motor court hotels started having problems in their early days. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover noted as much in a February 1940 article in The American Magazine, with the help of pulp writer Courtney Cooper. “There is today a new home of crime in America, a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery and murder,” they wrote.

The nation’s top G-man was talking about roadside motels, lodgings on the outskirts of town. Hoover claimed they were popular with unsavory characters bent on illicit behavior.

“Many of them are not only hide-outs and meeting places, but actual bases of operations from which gangs of desperadoes prey upon the surrounding territory,” Hoover (and Cooper) wrote. “There are few major cases in the FBI involving an extended pursuit, in which the roadside crime-nest is not responsible for some form of easy lawlessness. ... Marijuana sellers have been found around such places.”

It would be another four decades before the Baton Rouge Alamo’s decline. Today, The Alamo’s most frequent guests seem to be the cops. Police dispatch logs show that for the past several years disturbances have been on the rise at The Alamo, while there are also numerous armed robberies, stabbings and shootings.

In 2003 police responded to more than 200 criminal complaints at The Alamo, but last year they were called out no fewer than 450 times. Through September of 2007 police already had handled nearly 350 complaints at The Alamo.

The criminal activity isn’t confined to the motel itself.

In July, Terry Molony, a long-time resident of the nearby Bernard Terrace neighborhood, discovered that someone had broken into her laundry room. Fortunately, her husband, Sean, had installed a security camera and caught the burglary on video. The thief turned out to be a woman wearing an easy-to-spot bright orange shirt and matching shorts. Sean and a neighbor, along with help from the cops, tracked the woman back to The Alamo Plaza.

Based on what Terry Molony learned later, she suspects the woman was a drug addict and probably a prostitute. That the woman was living at The Alamo didn’t surprise Molony. “Fifteen years ago, we all knew it was a drug-ridden place,” she says.

Sonny Calandro puts it even more bluntly: “It’s gone to pot.”

Most of the calls police respond to at The Alamo are for assaults, fights and vice offenses, but The Alamo has seen its share of more heinous crimes:

• The arrest of a 47-year-old man for the stabbing death of his 73-year-old female cousin.

• The capture of an escaped serial rapist found hiding out in one of the rooms.

• A vice squad bust of a man and woman for selling drugs to undercover officers and for offering to sell them sex with a 15-year-old girl.

• The arrest of a hold-up man for robbing a nearby convenience store.

Perhaps the most infamous crime at The Alamo was in 1986 when Ronnie Lee Tuggle kidnapped a woman and her three children at gunpoint and held them captive in a room at The Alamo Plaza, where he repeatedly raped the woman and even tried to rape her 10-year-old daughter. By then the chain had already dropped its marketing slogan, “Catering to those who care.”

Because The Alamo Plaza doesn’t operate a restaurant, it’s not required to have a permit from the state’s Office of Public Health. But the agency does investigate complaints of unhealthy conditions, and records show at least 10 complaints in the past five years.

In June, one motel guest complained that her room was “infested with rats, fleas, spiders, etc.”

In February, a woman who stayed at The Alamo said the place was so disgusting she had to change rooms three times. In her complaint, she wrote: “One room I stayed in was full of baby rats. I was scared to go to bed. There were roaches everywhere.” She also called the motel “a gateway for crime,” a description J. Edgar Hoover would have no doubt agreed with.

Health inspector Artis Pinkney was sent to investigate the woman’s complaint. According to his written report, he found rat droppings in the sinks, faulty wiring, broken fixtures and heavy structural damage.

“All of the rooms seem to be in the same condition,” Pinkney wrote. “The manager does not repair any of the rooms. In my professional opinion, I would suggest the building be condemned.”

Dash Patel is The Alamo Plaza’s general manager. She leases the property from the owner, Ashok Patel of Carrollton, Texas. They are not related, Dash Patel says. A calendar hanging behind the front desk bears the name Patel and Associates, a California insurance and investment firm. That Patel isn’t related either, according to The Alamo’s manager. Patel is the Indian version of Smith or Jones, she says.

The filthy conditions at The Alamo are not the fault of the management, Dash Patel insists. “It’s just the kind of customers we get. I am constantly keeping it up. People fight, they break into the rooms, they break everything.”

Despite the roaches and the rats, Patel says the 90-room motel has a 75% to 80% occupancy rate. The $45 nightly rate drops to $25 if customers pay by the week, and just under $20 if they pay by the month. She estimates 10% of her customers are long-term residents.

Patel, who keeps her late model Mercedes SUV locked up inside a plywood shed next to the motel office, says guests rip out the smoke alarms so they can cook in the rooms. They also have a tendency to steal everything not nailed down. Patel says she bought three truckloads of furniture from the old Plantation Inn on Airline Highway recently when it closed down, but since then every piece of it has been stolen.

Department of Health and Hospitals spokesman Bob Johannessen says his agency can’t shut down a motel without a court order. To get such an order the state must show that conditions at the motel are so bad they pose an “imminent threat” to public health.

So far, conditions at The Alamo haven’t gotten that bad. And even if they do, getting a shutdown order isn’t easy. “It’s a long and arduous process,” Johannessen says.

Terry Molony, the Bernard Terrace resident whose laundry room was broken into in July by an Alamo guest, says with the resurgence of downtown and Mid City as entertainment, dining and shopping districts, and with The Alamo sitting right between them, there’s no reason it couldn't be made into a nice motel once again.

“Let’s get it cleaned up,” Molony says. “It’s a great old building. Why not make it a landmark that we can be proud of?”

Click here for an first-hand account of writer Chuck Hustmyre's stay at the Alamo.