The Watson Motel

 

Earlier this month, I visited Louisiana for the first time since 2012. I stayed in New Orleans most of the time, but rented a car to come up to Baton Rouge for the day to explore for a new ABR post. 

I've covered the sad-sack motels of Airline Highway before, but I missed the Watson Motel for two reasons: it's pretty far out in the southern direction I rarely ventured, and it's almost totally overgrown, so if you're not looking for it, it's very easy to miss. 

What type of establishment was the Watson Motel and its attached bar? It closed before the Information Superhighway really got going, so very little information is available online. 

But there is this:

In 2010, "Papercutninja" remembered it thusly on Tigerdroppings.com.  

I used to live in Pecan Creek across from the State Fair Grounds. I used to ride my bike down the street that backs up to motel on my way to work at that McDonald's. I vividly remember seeing what looked like rental cars there parked out by the rooms. There is no chance that there was not prostitution going on there. I also remember a rumour about there being some kind of store or bar there that only sold single beers and half pints of hooch. It was allegedly called "Steve's" and it was supposedly a hang out for people that went to Woodlawn but who knows. Kids tend to spread shite around just to do so.

Having seen the place, I wholeheartedly believe this. (The first part would be a safe guess anyway, as the Watson was a motel located smack in the prostitution corridor between BR/New Orleans.) 

Shall we?

The Bellemont, Part the Last (part two) (the actual last)

(For the first part of this post from my 2012 return to the Bellemont, click here. To see what it looked like in 2008, click here.)

 

BAR

The Bellemont's bar and lounge has gone by other names, most recently Brella's. In 1957 it was The Planters' Room.

 

 

 

The black and white photos above and the other historic shots here are from Baton Rouge library archives, dug up by Becky. In the above case, an article/brochure effused praise of the rooms' Old World-meets-New World decor, murals, furnishings, the chandelier imported from Czechoslovakia, and yadda. I regret not looking behind the bar for the old mural, but didn't examine these photos til after I had visited.

 

The Bellemont, Part the Last

Most accomplishments in my adult life first appeared as items on to-do lists written on scrap paper. An abandoned motor lodge over 1,000 miles from my Brooklyn apartment called The Bellemont first made it back onto one of those to-do lists on March 30 when a commenter on this blog wrote that it was the lodging for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford while shooting the film "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" at Houmas House on River Road. (Joan did not last long on the film set-- it's too much to get into here, but there was no love lost between the actresses. Here's a quote on imdb.com attributed to Bette about Joan: "For a goddamn week in Baton Rouge, she brought twenty pieces of luggage. It was a black-and-white movie but she had color-coordinated outfits for the daytime scenes, and for the night shots all of her evening dresses were chiffon, which meant that the wardrobe lady had to spend hours ironing them in the one-hundred-degree weather." )

It wasn't just those two superstars who stayed at the Bellemont (allegedly): it was Clark Gable, John Wayne, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and later Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor when filming "The Toy", as well as Sonny and Cher, presumably when they were employed full-time by America as wearers of horribly awesome polyester pantsuits.

And all of this is just what I gleaned from digital hearsay in my blog comments. There is much history at The Bellemont. There are people who remember it and stories to be told. There is at least an article to be written here, and I'd love to write that article. I wished I had the time. While I am grateful to be an employed writer, after a minimum two-hour round trip of commuting each day, I return home drained of the energy for such extracurriculars.

 

 Only about two weeks ago, when I heard they were tearing down The Bellemont, I knew I had to go down and see it all before it was too late, and I pitched the article. Before, I'd only seen it from the outside looking in--this time I would get inside and I would really explore it. Fortunately, Memorial Day weekend was coming up. And fortunately, my flight attendant friend had buddy passes so I could travel on short notice. And fortunately in this case, things do not move fast in Baton Rouge, including demolitions.

Here is just some of what I saw at The Bellemont on one day during its final weeks of existence.

 

 

Motels of Highway 61 Revisited

Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61."

Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, also known as the storied Highway 61, is famous for its sketchy motels. Sketchy motels are an essential part of our cultural heritage: that's where nearly all the murdering and philandering and all sorts of untoward business goes down. Just look at every movie from No Country For Old Men to...well, almost every other movie ever.

It was at one of these Airline motels a little further south, Sugar Bowl Courts, where Jimmy Swaggart met with disgrace in 1987, along with his ladyfriend the prostitute. They don't still exist in the numbers they used to, but kind of shockingly, these mom & pop motels do still exist in this era of chain hotels and motels. 

A few such establishments have already appeared here on Abandoned Baton Rouge: Ten Flags Inn and The Bellemont, the latter which you can see in happier days above. All of the historic "before" postcards in this post were found online or otherwise by Ken Freeman and posted on his website dedicated to remembering his hometown, Alexandria Retrospective. After he contacted me recently, the historic postcard section about Baton Rouge on his website gave me a new idea for finding sites for this blog: work backwards from historic photos and their addresses. Seeing those motel postcards prompted me to make a trip to Airline and see what was still standing. 

The exercise reinforced a lesson I've been learning: seek and you shall find.

Endless Buffet of Leftovers

And now, a bunch of sites I've been meaning to post from two recent excursions, but they were trumped by the showing and telling of the time I saw coffins and the time I could have ended up in a coffin.

First, yet another car repair joint, this one on Florida and more colorful than most. Note the sinkhole in the repair floor, below. 

 

Motel Zero and the Horndog

In part one of this exciting two-part post, co-explorer Kara and I opted not to go into the green crackhouse. Instead, we went into this motel, where I'd glimpsed people inside when driving by the previous afternoon. Makes perfect sense, right?

Abandoned Baton Rouge Roadshow

I just got back from a road trip from Philadelphia down through the South, and spotted a lot of abandonment along the way. The real pay dirt was in Jackson, Mississippi, a capital city with a downtown as eerily abandoned as Baton Rouge's. Anyone ever see the early '70s movie The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston? I recommend it during this fine Halloween season, and driving through empty Jackson was like Heston driving through empty L.A. in that movie.

But first, how about a nice burned-out motel? [Click to enlarge]

Takin' care of buisness...

...of the non-abandoned kind. Sorry I've been away, but sometimes the paying jobs take precedent over the abandoned documentation job. Also I haven't had use of a car or the good camera. However, in about three weeks I will have my beloved wheels back in my possession, and because of that, I will have much more access to the good camera.

Since my last post I made two trips to New Orleans, and the first one took me to an area I had never seen, one which had so many abandoned businesses and homes that I nearly drove off the road a few times gawking at them.

Driving past the still-prominent damage from Katrina (including another abandoned Winn Dixie with weeds coming up throughout the parking lot) while listening to the people on the radio discuss the nooses that were recently hung across the state in Jena was enough to give me the hair-standing-on-end shiver I used to get whenever I got near the Ground Zero site in lower Manhattan. Time to change the channel or I'll cry. I don't feel qualified to even go there in New Orleans, not to mention that (to make another Big Apple comparison), the crime rate there is comparable to New York in the '70s, I'm told. No wandering around down there for me, although that is a fascinating project just waiting to happen, photographers!

But here's an article about how homeless people have taken over some of the abandoned buildings in New Orleans.

Also, remember the Lincoln Hotel? I couldn't find anything about it when I first shot photos of it a few weeks ago, but I just read this article in The Advocate mentioning that Aretha Franklin stayed there! So, probably, did James Brown, B.B. King, and Nat King Cole. The article is about the barbershop next door but mentions that all of those cats had their hair did there, so I assume they were also staying at the Lincoln Hotel. Very cool. What's not so cool is my hypothesis that they stayed at this rather plain hotel becuase they were not welcome at the elegant downtown hotel that's now the Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center Hotel. That's pure speculation on my part, of course.

I really want to go in there.