Abandoned Baton Rouge

Best Comment Ever, Miss Havisham's Repair Shop Edition

I chose this month's Best Comment Ever from a post about a mysterious TV repair shop because it shed some light on a site that might not be abandoned after all, while adding more layers of mystery.

FWIW, that "TV repair shop" looks totally abandoned, but I don't think it is. The buildings in your first two photographs were occupied by a mysterious...well, TV repair business as recently as 5 years ago. It's a loooong, story, but here's the short-short version: Against my better judgment, I purchased a cheap Akai TV from Sam's Club. The TV, of course, broke after a month. Akai actually had me drop it off at the buildings in your photo (which confused me because they looked much the same at that time). The inside of both buildings was creepy in a way that's hard to describe. The one on the left (top) seemed to be where they actually worked, and the other one seemed to be storage or something, but the contents of both seemed much the same to me--a combination of an old TV repair shop and Miss Havisham's dining room, frozen in time like something you'd find inside a pyramid. The three chain-smoking guys (all men a generation apart in age, probably from the same family) who seemed to own the shop were very odd, but affable enough. Still, I couldn't help but wonder what exactly was going on there that allowed them to make enough money to justify the place's continued existence. (And as for that speaker: They seem to have those wired up throughout the place, and connected to a radio to listen to while they...do whatever it is they do with their time in there. Perhaps the one outside is their way of signaling that someone is "home" because otherwise, it would be difficult to tell.

Thanks to David Pye for that back story. It's comments like this that keep me ever vigilant for more vacant buildings to feature on Abandoned Baton Rouge. 

And welcome newcomers! If you found Abandoned Baton Rouge via my presence at South by Southwest or you're otherwise new to this blog, read on for suggested points of entry.

Best Comment Ever, Lincoln Theatre Edition

One of the more historic buildings featured on Abandoned Baton Rouge is the 1950s-era Lincoln Theatre, at one time a "blacks only" movie house. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke there when planning the Montgomery bus boycott. According to commenters on the post, musicians such as James Brown and Chuck Berry performed there, it showed porn and blaxsploitation films toward the end, and it was possibly the site of a race riot in 1972, although that was probably at the Temple theater. (Such is the ephemeral nature of "oral" history passed on in blog comments.)

Best Comment Ever

 

It's Friday, so you know what that means (no you don't, yet)-- It's time for ABR's new regular feature, Best Comment Ever!

For this week's month's Best Comment Ever, we're going all the way back to a post from 2007 when my old camera Old Blue Eye made everything look blue, and a storytelling comment which was left by commenter Jay in 2008. The post covered LoBianco's Grocery, among other Government Street buildings.