When developer David Slaughter proposed a 115-unit apartment building on the edge of Spanish Town, the reaction from the neighborhood was swift and almost universally negative. There was nothing too surprising about that; neighborhood associations routinely oppose new developments in their backyards. And some of the concerns, like traffic, parking and drainage, are typical.
But Baton Rouge’s oldest neighborhood has a weapon most other communities don’t: a historic designation, and a panel to enforce it.
“The end of these fights always means that something historic gets bulldozed,” resident John Sykes. “I’m trying to draw the line for once.”
Sykes is Spanish Town’s representative on the city-parish Historic Preservation Commission, a fairly obscure body that in theory has the power to stop Capitol Lofts, planned for the end of North Sixth Street overlooking Arsenal Park. Spanish Town joined Drehr Place as an official parish historic district last spring, which means the commission must approve any new developments or demolitions.
Slaughter expects to go before the commission in August with a scaled-down, 67-unit version of the project. If denied, he can appeal to the Metro Council. This will be the first time the commission and the historic district ordinances have been tested by a significant development.
Several houses considered contributing elements to the neighborhood’s historic status would be demolished for the project, which is one of Sykes’ primary concerns. But he says any new construction is supposed to be compatible in scale, height, design and materials to the rest of the neighborhood, according to the relevant ordinance, and argues what he had seen so far of Capitol Lofts fails to meet those standards.
The commission had its first crack at Capitol Lofts on June 17. At the time, Slaughter had a date with planning and zoning the following Monday for a possible rezone from A4 [general residential] to A5 [high-rise apartment district], which would have been needed to build 115 units.
The Downtown Development District commission had punted by then, saying they didn’t have enough information to support or oppose the development. Carolyn Bennett, a Historic Preservation Commission board member as well as the executive of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, added the item to the HPC agenda, and invited Slaughter to attend.
“My read is he wants to do the right thing,” Bennett said at the meeting. “But the design that has been put forth at this time is not what everyone feels is the right thing.”
Some commission members and city-parish head planner Troy Bunch argued planning and zoning should deal with the issue first. Bunch said the historic commission has no jurisdiction until Slaughter applies for a certificate of appropriateness, and Slaughter still had a few hoops to jump through first, including a review of his site plan by planning commission staff and the Department of Public Works.
“It is premature for us to dissect this project until we have an application, because we don’t know what they are proposing,” Bunch said.
Sykes, with the support of perhaps a dozen Spanish Town residents packed into the cramped meeting room, disagreed. He argued the plans available at the time, and the A5 rezoning proposal specifically, clearly violate the historic district ordinance, and said the historic commission should tell the planning commission as much.
“Can we rationalize our guidelines with A5? I don’t think we can,” Sykes said.
“The sketch we gave is very preliminary,” Slaughter said. “We’re working with the neighborhood to try and reach a compromise. All options are still on the table.”
In the end, the historic commission voted to recommend planning and zoning put off its ruling, which is what happened. The Metro Council chamber was standing room only that evening, with many in the audience wearing pink [the pink flamingo is the unofficial mascot of Spanish Town] and holding homemade signs, some of which read, “Historic Spanish Town: Don’t Destroy It.” When the commission voted to defer, a muted cheer was heard, and then most of the crowd followed Historic Spanish Town Civic Association Chairman David Brown out of the room.
On July 8, Slaughter announced the new specs for Capitol Lofts: 67 units, including 18 one-bedrooms, 40 two-bedrooms, and nine three-bedrooms, all doable within the existing A4 zoning. The new design concept is four stories—not six—which is still bigger than the rest of Spanish Town. But the property sits at the bottom of a slope, and the height might be acceptable to some who objected to the original design.
“I feel that because of the discussion we had at our June meeting of the Historic Preservation commission, and because of the actions of the Spanish Town Civic Association and the Foundation [for Historical Louisiana], that’s why the backdown from A5 took place,” Bennett says. FHL has discussed the project, but its board has not taken a position.
Slaughter says the quality of the apartments will be comparable to something like The Millennium Towne Center, which charges from $995 to $1,220 for a one-bedroom, according to the Apartment Finder Web site.
“I’ve been looking to do a project like this downtown for a while,” he says. “The problem is there are only a few people who control property downtown.”
Downtown development has all the challenges of greenfield building, along with the difficulty of finding a large enough property that can be acquired for a reasonable price, he says. The lots making up the 1.7 acres where Capitol Lofts would be built mostly belong to Richard Preis, who agreed to become a partner in exchange for putting up the land. Preis is solely a land equity investor, Slaughter says, not the developer.
Slaughter says he knew about the historic designation from the beginning. “If this property was in the middle of Spanish Town, I would not try this project,” he says. But there’s already a two-story apartment building called Arsenal Park next door, and a commercial site where a 100-foot Louisiana Economic Development building is planned is nearby, he says.
Slaughter had considering applying for a new type of zoning under consideration by the city, an “infill small planned unit development,” or ISPUD, but decided trying to get an ISPUD might slow down his progress, and an unknown entity might scare the neighborhood, he says.
Rex Cabaniss, the project’s lead architect, was working on a new design; critics said the first concept looked more like Dallas than Spanish Town. The historic ordinance calls for new construction to be aesthetically similar to its surroundings, but how does an apartment building fit in with a neighborhood full of bungalow houses? He says the architects walked the streets to get a sense of the setbacks, window and entry placements, roof pitches and other details of the houses that could be reflected in the design.
“The challenge here is that the neighborhood allows A4 zoning, which allows a building of this scale,” Cabaniss says. “We are not trying to mimic the appearance of a single-family residence. The fact that it fronts the State Capitol park, in our view, makes it a different segment of Spanish Town, which is more in keeping with a building of this nature. This would not be the same building we would try to design for the center of Spanish Town.”
Building features will include stucco and wood siding, nonreflective glass, and “a small variety of muted finish colors to modulate the massing of the façade,” Slaughter says. He will ask for a variance to build past the setback line along State Capitol Drive, which would allow builders to push the lobby area forward and create a pedestrian-friendly front address. To compensate for areas that are past the line, he plans to set other areas further back.
Brown, the Spanish Town association chairman, is encouraged by Slaughter’s move to shrink the development’s scale, but stresses a smaller building doesn’t solve most of the issues.
“I understand they’re going to develop something, and I want to work with them. So far we haven’t worked with them much,” Brown says, adding the neighbors would have some ideas to offer if asked. “We’ve been hearing from them, and they appear to be listening to some extent. But they don’t appear willing to budge on the footprint of the structure, which would step right on top of seven historic homes.”
But perhaps the only way to avoid demolishing those buildings is to restore them [tax credits are available for restoration projects within a federal historic district like Spanish Town] and build townhomes or single-family homes alongside them, which is not part of the plan.
“We want something that blends in well with the rest of the neighborhood,” Brown says. “It’s a test case of our historic ordinance. It remains to be seen how much of a protection that is.”
