Armed with ideas taken from a March meeting on what to do with the site of the former Earl K. Long hospital on Airline Highway, LSU students drew up two plans over the summer and presented those conceptual renderings to local politicians and residents Thursday night.
The plans call for a mixed-use development, including restaurants, retail and grocery stores, as well as a community center, child care center and medical facility to surround a park in the middle of the tract. Renderings of the plans show a park with a playground, outdoor fitness area and ample green space with several trees providing shade.
In one plan, parking spaces will surround the interior space on three sides and those parking spaces will front businesses that make up the outside of the development. See the rendering. In the other plan, businesses will flank the interior space on two sides with the main parking areas sitting on the opposite ends of the tract. See the rendering. One of the plans also would incorporate a residential component.
“I think they did a good job of trying to make a good balance and balance the site conditions with the wants of the community,” Diane Jones Allen, an adjunct landscape architecture professor at LSU, says of her master’s landscape architecture students who participated in the project.
State Sen. Sharon Weston Broome, D-Baton Rouge, one of the local leaders spearheading the project, agreed and called the plans a step in the right direction.
“I thought that the plans, the conceptual plans, really captured the ideas that the citizens passed along at the first meeting,” Broome says. The students, she adds, stayed away from things the residents did not want to see, such as strip malls or discount stores.
Surveys collected from those who attended Thursday’s meeting will now be reviewed, which could lead to some alteration in the plans presented, while a steering committee will begin sharing the concepts with developers, Broome says. Developers are also being sought by the committee to lay out their vision for the 14.25-acre property.
“Our goal is to really collaborate with the citizenry. We have no pre-conceived plans for the property, except we want it to add value to the community,” Broome says of her and the other politicians working to make the plans a reality.
Broome says she has had preliminary discussions with interested businesses, but has nothing concrete yet. The property is owned by the East Baton Rouge Housing Authority, and there is no timeline for completion right now.
—Ryan Broussard
