Nationally renowned New Urbanist planner Andres Duany—best known locally for Plan Baton Rouge, his 1998 master plan for downtown—says downtown Baton Rouge today is at the tipping point and that the newly opened downtown Matherne’s supermarket is the “great breakthrough.”
“I used to be an advocate of getting movie theaters downtown,” Duany tells Daily Report. “I feel I was wrong. It’s more important, actually, to have a market … and this one was just very well done.”
Duany says developing a full-service supermarket in a downtown neighborhood is challenging enough and that he has never seen one of such “fantastic quality” as the Matherne’s. He praised the store’s design, nestled in and around the old bank vault of the former Capital One bank building, the configuration of the parking lot and the quality of the store’s upscale merchandise.
