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.
Duany isn’t one to offer praise lightly. The designer once referred to some aging Spanish Town cottages in the throes of a land-use controversy as “mud huts,” and he still today has strong words for certain downtown landowners who continue to cling to their surface parking lots.
“I think some people aren’t dying soon enough, and I think there might be a longevity problem with some of the property owners downtown,” Duany says. “People are sitting on property and holding everything up to a fantastic extent. (Plan Baton Rouge) raised land values, and people just sat on them. Now they’re beginning to release the property, and that is going to make so much difference.”
Duany was in town earlier this week working on 1509 Government, a redevelopment project of the former Entergy site on Government Street. That plan will be unveiled in early March. Duany says he gets too much credit for the redevelopment of downtown and Plan Baton Rouge, which helped shape it.
“We all know very well who does the work,” Duany says. “It’s people like [Downtown Development District Executive Director] Davis Rhorer. He gets up every morning and thinks to himself, ‘Now how can I kick the can forward today?’” —Stephanie Riegel
