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Baton Rouge spends a lot of time obsessing over its future these days: Where are we going? What can we be? Will there finally be jet packs?

The future can wait for a few moments while we think about the past—like the old haunts that for decades were as much a part of Baton Rouge culture as crawfish and politics but are now just memories.

The list is long and growing, though Business Report singled out a few notables—Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche, The Village and the Broadmoor Theater—for a tip of the hat and a leisurely drive down memory lane.

Let’s start with the place Ripley’s Believe It or Not once designated as the world’s longest department store.

The big store

Few institutions left a bigger void than the loss of the Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche department store on Main Street. When the Sternberg family sold the store in 1992, it marked the beginning of the end for a business that had served generations of Baton Rougeans since 1907, when brothers Bernard and Jake Goudchaux first opened their doors.

Erich and Lea Sternberg, who immigrated to the United States from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, bought the store in 1945 after years of leasing it. Making the trip with their mother in 1937 were Hans, then a year old, and his older brother, Josef. Erich handed the reins to his sons in 1964 and died the following year. Josef and Hans, along with their mother and Hans’ wife, Donna, ran the company for decades. Josef died in 1990.

Their first branch store, Goudchaux’s at then-Cortana Mall, opened in 1976. When the Sternbergs bought Maison Blanche in 1982, the downtown flagship store became Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche. Goudchaux’s was dropped from the company moniker in 1988, though the logo remained on the downtown store and is visible today. Lea wasn’t happy to see Goudchaux’s go.

“My mother threw a fit,” Hans says. “She was still working in her late 80s. She was still coming to the store in her 90s.”

The Sternbergs weren’t afraid to experiment. Interest-free credit, for instance. It sounds hopelessly quaint today, but Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche customers got five months interest free or, for purchases of $300 or more, a special 12-month interest-free charge account.

It worked. In the 1980s, Baton Rouge’s Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche stores did more business than all their competitors combined. Despite that, it was a nasty decade for Louisiana and retail department stores nationwide. Savings and loans were collapsing left and right, while industry titans like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s slid into bankruptcy.

The 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair, a financial sinkhole, destroyed the Sternbergs’ venerable competitor D.H. Holmes, which had invested millions in the doomed venture. The Sternbergs didn’t trust the fair’s projections and didn’t invest, thus avoiding a similar fate. All the same, the end was near.

At its peak, Goudchaux’s/Maison Blanche had 24 stores in Louisiana and Florida, with 640,000 customer charge accounts, Donna says, making it the largest family-owned department store group in the country. Baton Rouge’s downtown flagship was the glittering jewel in the crown.

The Sternbergs had outfitted generations of Baton Rougeans from baby clothes to business suits over the decades and become firmly part of the city’s identity—an institution.

“At one time, the Main Street store did the largest volume per square foot of any single department store in the country, including Bloomingdale’s,” Donna says.

But the hard times got too hard. The Sternbergs, whose family had been in the retail business for 200 years, finally decided to pack it in.

“The toughest day of my life was when I had to go tell my mother, ‘I’m selling the store,’” Hans says. “The second-toughest time was when I actually did do it.”

The family sold to Mercantile Stores Inc., which kept the Maison Blanche name until being acquired by Dillard’s in 1998. Dillard’s pulled the plug on the downtown store in 2000.

Today, the Sternbergs, with their son Erich, own Starmount Life Insurance and are writing a history of the family and its business ventures. Hans says he still hears a lot from former Goudchaux’s customers.

“When we go out to breakfast, the people who recognize Hans are getting older and older,” Donna chuckles.

Her husband, who as a kid made a dime a day cleaning up paper clips and pop bottles at the store he would one day run, tips his hat to Baton Rouge for so many good years.

“We always appreciated very much the people of Baton Rouge,” Hans says. “They were great people to work with, and we had some customers we thought of almost as family. We have always been deeply grateful to Baton Rouge for the way they helped the store grow.”

The big restaurant

It started with a raid. The year was 1945, and Vince Distefano was running a game called Georgia Skin out of a leased building on Florida Boulevard. They played for horses. Vince’s wife, Stephanie, made good tips cooking for the crowd but stayed out of the games. All the same, she and everyone else were hauled off to jail one morning when the sheriff paid a surprise visit.

The sheriff, not above the occasional unofficial visit the Distefano establishment, had some advice: Get out of town—outside the city limits. So the family bought a wooded seven-acre fishing camp on Airline Highway from the Catholic Church and built a new place, this time beyond the reach of the law.

Travelers frequently mistook it for a restaurant because of all the cars parked out front. Eventually, the Distefanos decided they might as well feed all those hungry motorists since they kept stopping. The Village was the eventual result.

In its heyday, the restaurant pioneered fine dining in Baton Rouge, counted movie stars among its customers and enjoyed status as one of the city’s hottest tickets. Judy Distefano, who in 1968 married Vince and Stephanie’s only son, Joe, says crystal and sterling silver service were standard. Gentlemen wore jackets.

Vince reconnoitered top restaurants in the biggest cities for ideas. In 1964, he imported from Italy a Genoese chef named Goffredo Fraccaro, who brought new pastas, veal and fish dishes and a 10-layer rum cake—all of which really got Baton Rouge talking.

Until The Village, New Orleans was for sophisticated dining, and Baton Rouge was for sticking frogs or whatever goes on in the country. Vince died in 1965, and Stephanie, who had attained near mythological status as “Miss Fanny,” took over day-to-day operations. The years eventually caught up with the restaurant that opened in 1947.

“If The Village had to have a failing, it’s they really didn’t groom the young people to make that their favorite place,” Judy says. “Once their older clientele died off, The Village kind of declined.”

It closed in 1992 when Miss Fanny retired, dying nine years later. Judy briefly reopened the restaurant as another Jack’s Grill location before accepting an offer for the property from a real estate firm representing Academy Sports. Judy, whose husband died in 2003, is publishing a history of The Village—including recipes—that she hopes strikes a chord with those who remember.

“It was just like you walked in those doors and you were in Italy,” she says.

The big screen

One of seven children of theater owner Gordon Ogden, Shelley Ogden Landry did things that would incinerate other children with jealousy—like parading around the mall in a Pink Panther costume as a publicity stunt. Or water skiing behind the James Bond boat from Live and Let Die because her dad was best friends with the stunt man. Or hanging out in the Broadmoor Theater’s projection booth and raiding the candy counter when she felt like it.

“Being part of a movie family, we ate popcorn before we had a bottle,” she says. “It was kind of fun being part of it because the small movie theater owners were kind of celebrities themselves.”

It wasn’t all fun: The Ogden siblings stocked concessions, filled mustard bottles, made hot dogs and sold tickets. And at some point, theaters across the country started selling orange drinks in orange-shaped containers.

“They were plastic oranges with little green tops,” Shelley says. “Those were the hardest things to fill.”

Her father sold his share of the theater business in 1977. Her uncles Randolph and Guy still own the Broadmoor—the last vestige of a theater empire that once reached into four states. Randolph Ogden says when the Broadmoor was built in 1965, it was the largest suburban movie theater in Louisiana and totally modern, with an orange and green interior. The 1,200 seats—some rocked, some didn’t—were blue and orange.

The building was designed by Ralph Bodman, one of Louisiana’s foremost architects and a founding member of the American Institute of Architects, Baton Rouge Chapter and the Baton Rouge City Club.

“We’d been reading about new theater-building in Miami,” Randolph recalls. “We flew into Miami in Ralph’s private plane. They used to call them shopping center theaters. We got some ideas from there, and he designed the Broadmoor.”

The theater had one screen originally, though was twin-plexed and then four-plexed in the mid- to late 1980s. It wasn’t just pressure from multiplexes moving into the market, Randolph says. Single features just weren’t drawing audiences for as long they once did. Aside from the occasional blockbuster, filling up the seats even through the first week of a normal run was getting tougher.

In 1987, the Broadmoor converted to a $1 cinema and it paid off—for a while. First runs finished on Thursdays. The Broadmoor would pick up the print on Thursdays from another theater right after the first run ended and start showing the same movie Friday. Customers lined up, and the theater made money because second-run rentals were substantially cheaper than first run.

“It was really great, but companies changed releasing habits and put a window on us,” Randolph says. “You had to wait six weeks after the first run. By that time, you could go rent the video. That’s what killed the dollar houses.”

The Ogdens went back to first-run movies in the late 1990s, charging a dollar less than competitors and hoping to make it up in concessions. The Broadmoor closed in 1999, then reopened several weeks later leased to theater operator Fred Williams. The projectors went dark again in April 2005 after Williams developed health problems.

And roll credits—probably.

Earlier this year, the theater was leased to Alan Wooley, owner of Wooley Entertainment, who says he wants to turn the Broadmoor into a dinner theater/film and concert venue. Randolph says he’d like to see something done with the theater, though renovating it won’t be cheap and he hasn’t seen his lessee for a while.

“I’m waiting to see if this guy is going to do anything,” Randolph says. “Every day I wait for him to walk in the door. For three months, it hasn’t happened.”