Huey P. Long Fieldhouse Pool

 

 

The Huey P. Long Fieldhouse was completed on the LSU campus in 1932. Hearsay says that Huey Long intended it to be the biggest pool around, longer than any run-of-the-mill Olympic-sized pool. It was designed by Weiss, Dreyfus and Seiferth, the same firm that designed the new state capitol.

UPDATE: This originally said "old state capitol" and a few commenters pointed out that I had my information wrong. Please forgive this damned Yankee.

Until the 1970s, it was required that every LSU student take a swim class, but by then the pool was already in decline. It has been closed since approximately 1999 and has been silently crumbling ever since, relatively unnoticed amidst the thriving campus.

In early June, I was allowed access to the condemned structure housing the pool *with police escort.* Gotta say, I love having a police escort. They can escort my scared ass any time around abandoned buildings.

 

 

 

Downstairs locker rooms:

Upstairs locker rooms:

 

Looking down from the gallery to the racquetball courts reveals a most Slaytanic view.

Oh, Satanists. Aren't they darling?

Also, some artistic graffiti--apologies for the blurry photo. 

 

 

The facilities used to feature a soda fountain and a ballroom, the latter pictured below.

The ballroom now appears to just be a big open dance studio, still used within the main fieldhouse building, now without the archways and foliage pictured above. At the time I was in there, I entered from what seemed to be a normal college classroom building, so I didn't recognize it as the former ballroom, only as an open room with a view of the pool.

 

You can sign an online petition to save the fieldhouse here. But SaveHPL.org, where you can find more information and historic photos, estimates it will take $10 million to restore the structure.

Why is this structure important? I'm no sports fan by any stretch, but it seems to me that this fancy pool, when new, was a game changer for what was once a minor country college. The fieldhouse was the seed of LSU as a sporting contender, setting the stage for the sporting powerhouse it is today (whether I give a crap about such things or or not). (Not.) So here's my idea, which could be much more effective: duke a buck or two off every Tiger admission ticket this coming season, set that aside for the restoration, and they should be golden. I did the math. (No I didn't.) But you have to admit: the LSU Tiger organization/ juggernaut can buy and sell God, so if they wanted to restore this building, they could. Come on, Tigers, you could. Admit it: I think Mike the Tiger eats organic nutria stuffed with tenderized, free-range rats stuffed with marinated field mice five times a day. So it can happen.

[Archive photos via saveHPL.org]

Comments

[emilie]

Fabulous post!! Thanks for documenting this sad waste of LSU space. The Fieldhouse is worth preserving -- don't know why LSU isn't interested in taking care of its legacy, but they did paint over the WPA murals so I shouldn't be surprised.

[jason]

wow! so beautiful, like the catacombs or something.

[vl100butch]

a wonderful piece of reporting, but i have to disagree with your understanding of why this building is important....

LSU in the late 20's early 30's was a place where a lot of incredible things were happening for one simple reason, Huey Long fell in love with the place and wanted the state to have a first class university for several reasons, not the least of was to have something that the common man and woman could be proud of and aspire to attend....so he poured money into the physical plant and wanted it to be bigger and better than anyplace else...

What happened then was a precursor to the impact of the GI Bill on higher education after WWII....a lot of young men and women got a college education....

in those days ROTC was compulsory (as it was at all land grant colleges across the nation), so you also had a large number of reserve officers commissioned, which came in real handy around 1940-41....considering that LSU provided more officers to the Army during WWII than West Point (fact)....

and the impact that those people had on the country as a whole from politics (Russell Long and Hubert Humphrey for example), to NASA and the space program and any number of other places....even literature, as Robert Penn Warren was one of the young lions of the faculty (and I still think that "All the King's Men" is a Greek tragedy with live oaks rather than a realistic commentary on Huey....)

so, my dear friend....we need to talk about this over yuengling...

[Colleen Kane]

Thanks all. & Butch, disagree away, but while you do provide a lot of extra background info, it doesn't really contradict what I wrote in the post, which was extrapolated from information on SaveHPL.org.

[Apollo]

Awesome photos, as usual. Assuming that the police escort was required for you to get access to the Fieldhouse, what did you have to do to get them to okay it?

[Danielle]

Thank you for this post. I'm from Baton Rouge, but did not go to LSU, so I had no idea about this structure. Seems a beauty that has gone to waste, and I have to say that makes me a bit sad. I never thought anything in such decay existing on a campus as beautiful as LSU's. Thank you for capturing it.

[Kaela]

So beautiful. Well, minus the satanic graffiti. I didn't know this existed either.

[vl100butch]

i should have gone into a bit more detail in my comment....if you were talking about the stadium dorms and that impact on LSU sports, i would have fully agreed with you...after all, that's how Huey got the WPA money to expand the stadium...build dorms for ROTC cadets (and put additional seating above them)...

hopefully, it's when you do the stadium dorms, you also go into Tiger Stadium without anyone in it, then take a good look at the lower east and west sides (sounds like i'm talking about manhattan, huh...) you will see where the original stadium ended and the seating added with the construction of the dorms begins.....

[gxtgrs]

As an LSU alumi, I was certified as a lifeguard at the Huey Long Pool in 1990 and later guarded and taught lessons there. It was still beautiful then. Yes, there was obvious signs of neglect (crumbling walls, graffiti, etc.), but regardless it was an amazing structure. It could have easily been turned around at that point if complete neglect would not have set in as recent as 1999.

[Meow]

In the picture above the Sunkist bottle, there is a piece of graffitti on the left. The almost same exact piece is on the scaffolding by Barcade in Williamsburg.

[Tracie Way]

LSU should be ashamed to let this happen!

[Jules]

This was a great post with amazing pics.

[Jonathon]

I remember reading a few posts back that you wanted to get into the Field House, so congrats on getting in. It looks like such an interesting place to explore, and I'd love to see it. But odds are by the time I would get there they would have started demo on it or something

[Michael]

In the 80s I both swam and played racquetball there. The pool was still very nice, the courts were old but you never had to wait for one.

Hope they restore the structure--I've made a small contribution, which, by the way, is tax deductible.

[Sarah]

I am a recent graduate of LSU's Kinesiology program which is housed in the HPL fieldhouse. The story goes that LSU was supposed to be given the funds necessary to restore the building. Then Katrina hit and the building fell to the bottom of the list. HPL now has to wait until the projects listed before it are completed again. Which in Louisiana, we know will take forever. I had a class in the HPL basement a couple semesters ago and the maintenance people were constantly fighting a rat problem. I was terrified one was going to crawl over my foot during class.

[Ron]

Lots of us lifeguards gained our certification at the old fieldhouse. I got mine in the late 80's and even then there were sections of the building that were closed off due to disrepair. I loved the pool though. As a student, I'd go as often as possible.

I remember being fascinated with the old structure and the odd architecture of the place. It's so unlike any of other campus buildings, it would be a terrible shame to let it be destroyed.

Thank you very much for posting these pictures.

[Renee' Bird]

In the late 80's we students could swim there and I couldn't believe such a gorgeous place was a hidden treasure. It was like our little secret. ;-)

In the 90's it was open to the public & parents could bring the little ones for a swim (which, as you know, is a BLESSING during that stifling Louisiana summer heat). I can't believe they would let such striking architecture go to ruin.

:-(

[AGB]

I was on the LSU faculty for 7 years. I swam in that pool everyday. It was my favorite place at LSU. It was beautiful. I remember the steam floating out of the building on cold days. What a waste. How like Louisiana.

[Susan Kirby-Smith]

I loved this post, so many pictures. I have been wanting to see this too since I first started looking at a book about the campus before I moved here. What beautiful old architecture. How sad that we can't view it freely.

[Leslie]

all I could think was, my gawd- the amount of mosquitoes breeding in that stagnant pool puddle.
This is one of my favorite posts you have done- i love the contrast of older pictures, which really shows how we let such beautiful things decline- it's like watching the rise and fall of economy. Your idea abomut ganking off LSU tickets is so smart - the amount of money made off of sports in BR is staggering.

[Mark Sawyer]

Did you know they erected a pneumatic roof over the pool at times? I spent most of my childhood running through this building, the racketball courts, the old armory basketball courts etc....when I wasn't standing in line at the football stadium with 1000 other boys tying to be the first to sell cokes to get in the game for free. You would use you first $5 to buy a tray of cokes then sit and watch the game and sell the cokes. Or if it wasn't a big game make some money. Great times

[James]

Great Job in uncovering whats going on with LSU's buildings. Have you every tried to get into Tiger Stadiums old dorms?

[TF]

How unutterably depressing, and so typical of the LSU system and Louisiana in general. I taught myself to swim in that pool back in the 1960s, and swam there regularly when I was a student at LSU in the 1970s/1980s. It was and is a gorgeous building and pool, and to see it in this terrible condition - well. What a horrible shame.

[kpd]

I used to sneak in late at night with some friends during the late 80's and play racquetball for a study break. We would climb a fence/gate to gain access. When we were done playing, we would dive off the top level into the pool for a cool down and then simply walk out one of the doors which would open from the inside when locked to outsiders. Later in life, my first daughter took her first swimming lessons there around '97. Shame to see it like this.

[A.N.R.]

My father attended LSU in the 60s and 70s (undergrad through Ph.D.) and just read this article. He told me that LSU students as far back as the 60s were not required to take a swim course; they were required to take two P.E. courses, swimming being one of the choices. Students being required to take swimming seems to be a modern LSU-related urban myth. He wanted to pass along that information :)