Marsha Richard has lived in Old South Baton Rouge, a section of the city between Louisiana State University and downtown, her entire life. She went to school there, her children go to school there and, as part of her weekly routine, she loads them into a car and drives across town to the Super Wal-Mart, where she does her grocery shopping.
When her children get sick, she gets medication from a Walgreen’s on Government Street. It’s the closest one to her house, she said, but it hasn’t always been that way.
Less than 10 years ago, a grocery store, a movie theater and several other residential-oriented businesses dotted Highland Road from Washington Street to the North Gates of LSU.
Those are long gone, replaced by rising apartment buildings and restaurants, seemingly directed at the student population of LSU. University Partners, a Dallas-based developer, plans to add another 25,000 square feet of retail space to the area by fall 2007, but whether those shops will service the Old South Baton Rouge community is another story.
Richard’s story is about time, distance and money. For Richard and other residents who live north of campus, it equates to convenience, utility and satisfaction. It’s the amount of time Richard spends going to Super Wal-Mart instead of the Super Fresh that used to stand at the North Gate. It’s also about the amount of money she spends driving to Walgreen’s on Government Street.
There used to be “good prices” and “good sales” at the Super Fresh, but Richard said she thinks the North Gate area is now exclusively focused on the students of LSU. That would be fine, she said, if Old South had its own contingent of restaurants and shops.
“They used to have little grocery stores around here,” Richard said. “I’d like to see more of that.”
Ginger Ford, director of community services for the Baton Rouge YMCA, has been a resident of South Baton Rouge for 51 years. Her father was a veterinarian on 19th Street. He eventually retired after being held up more than a dozen times, she said.
Ford spends her Tuesdays and Thursdays working a food-and-clothing giveaway for the homeless in front of the Baranco-Clark YMCA on Thomas Delpit Drive. She remembers the businesses of the old North Gate too, and says more grocery stores would do the current residents of Old South little good.
“Everything down there costs a lot of money,” she said. “These people have to get the discount stuff anyway.”
Ford said Old South is a “crime area” and that new businesses won’t open up and target the residents here because they don’t want the prostitution, drugs and crime that she said are widespread in the area.
“People don’t want poor people around; it looks bad,” Ford said. “Nobody would open up a business here.”
But Kim Hardcastle, spokesperson for Dallas-based FirstWorthing, the company that encompasses University Partners, said although there have been no retail leases signed for the spaces available, it would be “premature” to speculate who those businesses would target.
“We do, however, expect significant job creation as a result of the new space,” Hardcastle said. “So that would certainly benefit the Old South Baton Rouge area.”
With the developing North Gate area to its south and the poor Old South Baton Rouge community to its north, John’s Seafood Po-Boy is a restaurant caught in the middle. Sitting on Highland Road, John’s is the first indication to students that they have crossed out of the student-business-driven North Gate and into the predominately black and economically stale Old South.
But John’s Seafood Po-Boy isn’t just a restaurant in Old South or in North Gate – it’s a meeting place, a cross-section of business people from downtown, construction workers from the North Gate and employees from LSU.
During one of his weekday lunch breaks, Carl Seymour and his son, Josh, are the only two white people out of the predominately black clientele. The two work installing alarm systems for a company out of Denham Springs and said they aren’t fazed by being the only white people in the restaurant. A few minutes after they sit down to wait for their food, a white couple walks through the door.
Carl and Josh said they had just installed a security system in a house in Old South when a resident recommended they go have lunch at John’s. They both agree that while there are nicer restaurants to visit in the North Gate area, John’s is a place where the two communities intersect because of one thing: fried food.
“The place is packed,” said Josh, who said he has eaten at John’s many times. “It’s definitely a place where people come to talk – you’ve always got someone in here doing business.”
On the other side of the restaurant, workers from Residential Life at LSU are waiting for their food. Ollie Burton, a Residential Life employee, lives in Old South. She said the new retail spaces in North Gate are just the evolution of businesses focused on students, and Old South still has a few family-owned grocery stores.
“There’s one right up the street from where I live,” Burton said. “I think [North Gate] is more for LSU, in my opinion.”
Old South resident Charles Green walks past John’s every day on his walk to work at a sorority house on LSU’s campus.
Sometimes he’ll stop at Jack In the Box to eat a hamburger on his way home. Restaurants aren’t the problem, he said, but retail space is.
“We don’t have any convenient stores around for the older people,” said the 33-year resident.”We used to could walk down here; now you’ve got to go clear across town.”
But Gwen Hamilton, head of the Old South revitalization project for Plan Baton Rouge and 33-year resident of Old South Baton Rouge, said she doesn’t think the Old South community has asked for more amenities such as a grocery store in the North Gate area during community development meetings.
Hamilton said there are plans to pursue a large grocery store somewhere in the area, but North Gate is not the target area for that project.
“I don’t know that in the community meetings we had that anyone including the students that attended said they wished it was at North Gate,” Hamilton said. “They said they wished it was in the community and that it would be accessible to all.”
Hamilton said the problem connects the LSU community to Old South residents.
“Students don’t have a grocery store or a drug store either,” Hamilton said. “That whole North Gate area has not serviced the [Old South] community in many, many years.”
While picking up food and clothing at the giveaway for the homeless at the YMCA, Richard says she and her children regularly enjoy the restaurants in the North Gate area. She said she hopes the development will bring more jobs for residents of Old South.
“They’re going to do some hiring hopefully,” Richard said. “I’m looking for a job.”
 
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