Downtown stories

Downtown Baton Rouge includes several generous appendices. One is the report of the 1963 Baton Rouge Goals Congress, a body convened to lay out a plan for the betterment of the city. Here are some of those original goals and where we stand today.

The Mississippi Riverfront

1963 Goal: Develop the Mississippi riverfront from south of LSU to the State Capitol Complex as a continuous recreation and leisure-time facility for tourists, visitors and residents.

2008 Reality: The riverfront may not be that continuous yet, but between casinos, museums and the downtown scene, there is a little something for almost everyone. The original plans included shopping, and that lags behind.

City Park

1963 Goal: Develop City Park including the present golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts and playground area, and the University Lakes into a major multi-use open-space recreation and leisure-time area.

2008 Reality: With a new and improved City Park now open, a dog park, improved tennis facilities and a meditation labyrinth, City Park most closely resembles the original plan.

Mass Transit

1963 Goal: Establish and operate in conjunction with other governments in the Capital Region an effective mass transit system.

2008 Reality: Residents can (and often do) argue about the effectiveness of Baton Rouge’s transit system. The original plan was simple and far-reaching, and most of the needs the Goals Congress was concerned with in 1963 have yet to be addressed.

Sitting in Ward Bond’s office, surrounded by scale models of the Hayden sculptures of Galvez Plaza, one gets a sense of the pride he feels in downtown Baton Rouge. Downtown revitalization is a subject Ward Bond knows well. A dedicated citizen activist, he has had a hand in many of the projects that have enlivened Baton Rouge’s downtown area these past 30 years. The River Center Library and Galvez Plaza, with its giant frieze of the Marcha de Galvez and bust of Oliver Pollock, are just two projects that benefited from Bond’s fundraising prowess.

But when Bond set out to write what he hoped would be a friendly and informative letter to Mayor Kip Holden, he had no idea that he was embarking on what would turn into a year-and-a-half-long project.

“I thought it would be five or six pages,” Ward says, laughing. “Now it’s ninety-six.”

The letter began as an attempt to inform Mayor Holden about some little-known facts concerning the downtown area. “I wanted to bring his attention to things,” Bond says. “Things he might not have known about, and might have wanted to.”

But the more he wrote, the more he felt he wanted to write. A letter was no longer sufficient for all the lost memories and information he was uncovering.

He mailed the original letter as planned, but the project also became a larger undertaking: telling the modern history of downtown Baton Rouge. The resulting book, Downtown Baton Rouge: A Story, spans 45 years, beginning with the founding of the original Louisiana Arts and Science Center in the Old Governor’s Mansion and ending with a look toward what Bond hopes is downtown’s bright future.

“At first, I had no idea where to start,” Bond admits. “I’m not a writer; I didn’t have an outline.” As former chairman of the Bicentennial Committee and the Civic Center Committee, he first thought to recount his memories of those projects. But it wasn’t long before he realized even that was insufficient to tell the story.

He settled on the year 1963. That is when the Foundation for Historical Louisiana began, and when much of downtown as we know it evolved.

“I wanted to get a record of how it all came to pass,” he says. Although Bond himself played a large role in how downtown has developed, in the book he is reticent to discuss his contributions. “I didn’t feel it was becoming to aggrandize myself,” he says. “There’s a larger story here.” So from Leland Richardson, who helped stop the destruction of Magnolia Mound plantation, to Jed and Lynn Morris, who founded Baton Rouge Green, Bond’s words give the sense that the real life of Baton Rouge is its varied people.

Bond also recounts interesting trivia and scads of information and opinion about the area. Downtown Baton Rouge covers, often haphazardly, everything from the forming of the 1976 Bicentennial Commission to the building of the Shaw Center for the Arts, but every paragraph is bursting with information from Bond’s vast collection of factoids.

Even Bond’s childhood, briefly recounted in the book, was largely spent wandering downtown, learning its buildings and history. The new State Capitol had immense impact.

“It gave me a sense of the world,” Bond says, “It taught me that things can be grand.”

It was that feeling of awe, the sense that history is important, that he really wanted to convey.

Despite the rambling nature of the book, themes emerge. The biggest, according to Bond, is the importance that planning has had on Baton Rouge and the impact it can have on the life of a city. Bond’s book shows how plans written as early as 1948 have recently come to fruition. He hopes these stories will encourage citizens to be more involved with the process.

“When you include the citizens, people turn out,” Bond says firmly. “I’ve seen it many times. People have ideas, great ideas, and they will work to make them happen. That’s what I really want people to take away from this: that they can get involved.”