Mayor Kip Holden went on the defensive at the outset of this week, calling a press conference Monday morning to remind everyone of all the major improvements in downtown in recent years after a story appeared in The Advocate over the weekend suggesting Baton Rouge is behind the curve when it comes to its riverfront development.
“He missed the point, though,” writes 225 Managing Editor Benjamin Leger in his occasional blog, Smart City. “No one was overlooking how far downtown has come—with the Shaw Center, improvements to the River Center, North Boulevard Town Square, Galvez Plaza, the resurgence of Third Street, several popular downtown festivals, a full-service grocery store and the sparkling new IBM offices, among other things.”
Despite the obvious progress, Leger notes all of the aforementioned downtown improvements have happened across the levee, away from the Mississippi River.
“The truth is, we’re a riverfront city with not much focus on the river,” Leger writes, noting he wrote about this topic back in 2013 when the first renderings of the IBM development were released.
“It was a pretty illustration of a gorgeous modern building. But it was depicted facing some railroad tracks and a slope of gravel down to a muddy river bank,” he writes. “Now that it’s nearly finished, it still has the same sad view. Granted, the designers could only use the landscape currently available to them when creating the rendering, but it was a stark reminder of how little we pay attention to the riverfront.”
Holden and other officials have argued that the biggest obstacles in the way of true riverfront development are the levee, managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the railroad, managed by Canadian National Railway. They point to other river cities, like St. Louis, Memphis or Chattanooga, that have been more successful developing their riverfronts because they aren’t impeded by levees and railways.
“Except that’s only true for one of the cities they cite. St. Louis has floodgates along most of its riverfront, and a railroad, too. But the city built up a park for the iconic Gateway Arch and the railroad tunnels directly underneath it,” Leger writes. “Memphis also has a railroad and floodgates standing in the way of its riverfront access, but they found a way around it to develop several small parks and pathways along the river.”
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