Rows of oaks create a canopy on Cherokee Street in the Garden District.
June 28th, 2009
Many Garden District residents have deep roots in the neighborhood
By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
Advocate staff writer
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of occasional features on neighborhoods in the Baton Rouge area.
Families move into the Garden District and stay for generations.
Take for example 5-year-old Michael Davis Alton and his 3-year-old brother, Isaac, who live with their parents, Joe and Emelie Kantrow Alton, on Olive Street, just two blocks from their grandparents, Mike and Jill Kantrow.
Their great-grandparents, the late Sis and Byron Kantrow, lived two blocks to the east, and their great-great-grandparents, the late Josh and Florence Bombet Kantrow, lived directly across the street.
The Alton boys also have several cousins and an aunt and uncle who live in the neighborhood. In fact, family members have owned as many as 20 different houses in the almost 100 years since the neighborhood was first developed.
There are other fifth-generation and sixth-generation children living in the Garden District, a conglomeration of three neighborhoods roughly bounded by Government Street on the north, St. Rose Avenue and Eugene Street on the east, Broussard Street to the south and South 18th Street and Park Boulevard on the west.
It’s a diverse neighborhood of more than 800 homes including mansions and traditional bungalows. Among its residents are old Baton Rouge families and families new to the area, black families and white families, professional people and blue-collar workers, LSU students and LSU professors, families with children and elderly widows and widowers.
The ‘frontier’
Roseland Terrace, the first of the three neighborhoods, was developed beginning in 1910 by brothers Tony and Eugene Cazedessus, according to the late Ernest Gueymard, former managing editor of the State-Times. Local citizens were certain the lots would never sell because they were so far from downtown.
“The site Tony chose was the old circus grounds and race track south of Government and east of Park Boulevard,” Gueymard wrote in a State-Times column. “Because of the presence of wild flowers, the subdivision was named Roseland Terrace.”
The subdivision was actually named in a contest conducted by the Zadok Realty Co., operated by the Cazedessuses. Anna Wolfe won a $5 gold piece for choosing Roseland Terrace after the Cherokee roses that bloomed in the area in the spring.
“It was a quiet and peaceful neighborhood — a ‘frontier’ to those who moved ‘so far out,’” the late Mildred Drehr said in a State-Times interview in 1975. At the time, she had lived in the neighborhood for 56 years. She recalled picnics in the fields where the other two subdivisions were later located.
Flying Circus
In 1911, many Baton Rougeans got their first view of an airplane during an aviation show, “Gates Flying Circus,” produced by L.B. Gates of Decatur, Ill., in the Kleinert Field adjoining Roseland Terrace.
According to State-Times reports, Gates brought William G. Purvis, of Chicago, and a primitive biplane made of canvas, wood and bicycle wheels.
On Feb. 2, Purvis made a brief flight in the airplane, but the propeller broke when he landed.
In his second flight 20 days later, Purvis flew the plane three-quarters of a mile at an altitude of 75 feet until he lost control during a sudden gust of wind. He survived the crash to fly two weeks later when locals, who had paid a hefty admission price, watched as Purvis crashed into an embankment. He died six weeks later from injuries sustained in the accident.
The Zadok Realty Co., which was selling the Roseland Terrace lots, advertised in the local newspaper, “Buy now — The prices are sure to go higher than the airship went.”
Tony Cazedessus worked hard to promote the development, even having someone film him in a silent movie spot that ran in the local theaters, said his nephew Duchein Cazedessus. “We used to go to the movies to watch Uncle waving his arms getting people to buy lots.”
First house
According to courthouse research, the Reiley-Reeves House, completed about 1912 on Park Boulevard, was the first house built in Roseland Terrace.
“It was built by my great-grandfather, George Junkin Reiley,” said Ann Reiley Jones, of Blairstown Plantation near Clinton. “He liked to build and collect big houses. He had one in the country, one in Clinton and built the one in Baton Rouge. They were all big.”
Reiley was the only member of his family in the area to survive the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 “by forcing a servant to keep food and liquids in him,” Jones said. “His father and siblings all died and are buried here in the yard at Blairstown. His mother and two brothers had gone back to New Jersey for school.”
Jones said that the “house changed sides of the family” when her maternal grandmother, Miriam Reeves, bought it from members of the Reiley family. Reeves moved to the home after getting her master’s degree in library science from Columbia University in New York.
The house is presently owned by Chip and Jane Coulter. He is a direct descendant of the original owner, and his daughters, Carolyn, 11, and Cathryn, 9, are sixth-generation Garden District children.
“Ann’s (Jones’) father, Bob Reiley Jones, used to ride his pet goat from this house to Third Street,” Chip Coulter said. “There was nothing but woods and pasture between Park Boulevard and downtown Baton Rouge.”
Roseland Terrace
The first child born in the neighborhood was Terrace G. Verbois, named for the subdivision He received an engraved silver spoon from the realty company at his arrival in 1912.
Betty Moyse Simmons moved to Oleander Street with her parents, Hermann and Rosalie Moyse in 1927. At the same time, her grandparents, Rebecca and Joe Gottlieb, moved next door.
“We all used to live on Convention Street,” said Simmons, who no longer lives in the neighborhood. “Mother and Dad had bought a lot on Park Boulevard. My grandfather was so upset that they were going to live so far away that he bought the house on Drehr and bought the house next door for Mother and Dad.”
The two families kept in touch by a private telephone line Joe Gottlieb had installed between the two houses.
“Roseland Terrace was THE residential neighborhood. It was the first real residential neighborhood in town,” Simmons said.
Mary Lou Riche is believed to be the resident who has lived in the Garden District the longest. “We moved in in 1929, and I have been living here ever since,” she said.
She attended Dufrocq, the neighborhood elementary school; Baton Rouge Junior High; and Baton Rouge High School. Her son and daughter-in-law, Guy and Mimi Riche, also live in the neighborhood.
Cherokee Gang
Old Baton Rougeans still relate tales of the Cherokee Gang, a group of eight or 10 “rambunctious” young men, about 15 or 16 years old. Among the group were Puna Eaton and Albert Fritchie, both deceased, who grew up to be well-known civic leaders. The gang was in the “height of its glory” in the late 1930s.
“They were not a criminal gang, but a fun-type situation,” said Judge Lewis Doherty, who was two or three years younger than most of the gang members. “I was not a real member of the gang, but I viewed their doings at a distance. They did tricks and jokes. The worst things that they did were like misdemeanors.”
He recalled one of their favorite stunts. “They would get an empty purse, attach it to a long string and put it in the middle of the street. Then they would wait in Puna’s front yard, and when a driver would stop to pick up the purse, they would reel in the string,” he said.
“That kind of stuff was about 90 percent of what they did.”
Drehr and Kleinert
Drehr Place was developed on the old Kugler Tract purchased by Alvin L. Drehr, Mildred Drehr’s father, in 1919. He paid $32,000 and developed the subdivision between Government Street, St. Rose Avenue, Myrtle Avenue and South 22nd Street.
“Mr. Drehr had a pasture right across the street from my grandparents’ house,” Simmons said.
In 1927, Kleinert Terrace was built on the sugarcane farm of Albert Kleinert, who came to the U.S. from Switzerland in 1844. It extended between Broussard Street on the south, Park Boulevard on the west, Myrtle Avenue on the north and Eugene Street on the east.
In 1936, R.E. Swinney canvassed the neighborhood to raise funds to install sidewalks and gutters on Terrace Avenue. He and his son rented a cement mixer and did the work themselves, an article in the Sunday Advocate reported.
He later circulated a petition to have the streets paved, with costs being shared by the residents. The work was completed in 1941, The Advocate reported, but “Swinney did not live to see it. The work was finished just in time for the mourners to visit and offer condolences to his widow.”
Civic Association
In 1975, the three subdivisions joined to form the Garden District Civic Association, now one of the most active civic associations in Baton Rouge. Alex Tucker, who lives in the old Swinney house, is the president. He has lived in the neighborhood for nine years.
Because of recent burglaries in the area, security is one of the “hottest topics” he has had to tackle in the few months that he has been president.
Association members pay a fee to provide an off-duty policeman, Sgt. Donald Stone, who knows the neighborhood and many of the neighbors.
“We are working with the neighbors to get people to turn on their porch lights and are considering security cameras in the alleys and block captains,” Tucker said.
The association sponsors at least two big parties a year including an Easter egg hunt and a fall picnic. Neighbors decorate their homes for Christmas and participate in a lighting contest.
The neighborhood association is having a drive to clean up Park Boulevard. There are plans to remove old water oaks and replace them with live oaks and to spruce up the Government Street entrance to the neighborhood.
“I think that by cleaning up this main artery and showing we care about our public spaces, it will lead to others respecting the area,” Tucker said.