Photos by Collin Richie
Longtime resident Robert Bigelow once described Spanish Town to me as a “ramshackle-and-gingerbread, postage stamp-sized slice of the Bywater.” It’s the oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge, dating back to 1805, and is certainly one of the most beautiful, with its climbing ivies and stretching oak trees, the patchwork of bungalow-style and Spanish architecture, and the adorable stray cat problem.
Sandwiched between I-110 and the Capitol, Spanish Town is a centralized pocket of residences, but it feels more like a Galapagos island, left to evolve in isolation. For all its aging beauty, Spanish Town is now the namesake of the state capital’s most cartoonishly vulgar—and most popular—Mardi Gras parade, which coils through the shady patch of one-way streets each Saturday before Mardi Gras.
Equal parts raunch and satire, it’s a poor-man’s parade that glorifies debauchery while roasting the state’s ever-growing stable of elected crooks, often to an audience who may have voted for them. Together, paraders gripe, drink, and pay homage to body parts usually kept under wraps but unveiled in handcrafted detail on floats during the parade. There’s plenty of cross-dressing, sexual innuendo, and foolishness; and folks from all of Baton Rouge’s conservative corners come out in droves to revel in it.
The parade’s flamingo mascot, ubiquitous on this day along with its signature Pepto-Bismol pink, purposely invokes tackiness; and that quality is inherent in parade themes and float design. With themes such as “FEMAture Evacuation,” “BP Blows and Wiki Leaks,” and “*$@# Big Brother,” taste clearly goes out the window. Likewise, organizers shun celebrity royalty, more likely to crown a local (Advocate columnist Smiley Anders, for one), a dog (his name was Rubin), or a convicted former governor (Edwin Edwards) than a famous actor.
After a few years of wandering the streets of Spanish Town with the purpose of researching a book, I’ve come to realize that this place, and its parade, are far deeper subjects than can be explained by a thirty-five year span, the length of time the parade has been rolling. While the following words are certainly a story about a Mardi Gras parade, they’re also a story about the neighborhood it came from and the unique constellation of historical circumstances and personalities necessary to spawn such an irreverent party.
The view from a float: Paraders in front of the iconic Spanish Town Grocery.
A Lengthy, Brief History
In 1805, Spanish Town was inhabited (and named) by Canary Islanders who had left Spanish-ruled Galvez Town, southeast of Baton Rouge, when it was ceded to the U.S. as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, the Islanders, who had only wanted to continue living under Spanish rule, ended up, less than a decade later, within American jurisdiction.
Fifty-odd years later, Spanish Town found itself within cannon shot of the Civil War during the Battle of Baton Rouge. Many beautiful homes were razed for firewood to warm Union troops. When the fighting stopped, newly-freed slaves found a fresh starting ground in Spanish Town’s rubble, where they carved out new lives for themselves and their families.
Fast-forward another fifty years, when Spanish Town became the closest neighbor to a newly-minted Louisiana State University. Spanish Town Road was renamed Boyd Avenue, and its shotgun homes were populated with professors, students, and artists. Huey stepped in and gave the neighborhood a new, long shadow after LSU was relocated in the early ‘30s, only to die at the hands of Dr. Carl Weiss—a Spanish Town resident—at the bottom of the State Capitol.
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the neighborhood flipped again, becoming home to a network of tight-knit Catholic families, many of whom went to Mass at Saint Joseph’s Cathedral every Sunday.
The neighborhood had seen its fair share of bad times. But long after the cannon fire, a much more insidious tragedy befell Spanish Town—and Baton Rouge, as a whole—in the late ‘70s: a plummeting oil market. “The Sheriff’s Department had to open up a new office just to process home foreclosures,” Robert Bigelow recalled. “People were using less oil and gas; kids were buying fuel-efficient Japanese cars; and the American automakers never got on the ball. The price of oil dropped so low, we could barely fund our state’s services.” With mass layoffs, families left Spanish Town, sometimes fleeing Baton Rouge altogether. The simultaneous desegregation of Baton Rouge’s public schools only added to the urban exodus. “[The neighborhood] almost went under,” remembered Duz Hamilton, current parade board member and founding member of the Krewe of Boyd Avenue. “Everybody bailed out here and left; no one was taking care of the houses; they had no restrictions on zonings. It was deteriorating bad; property values were going down.”
It was then, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (also the period that saw the onset of the AIDS crisis) when gay men in conservative-leaning Baton Rouge gravitated to this neglected enclave. The neighborhood, changed by economic forces, offered them a chance to pay lower rent prices among a mixed socioeconomic crowd that wouldn’t tar and feather them. There, they cultivated networks of friendships and looked after one another. Troubles aside, this era of Spanish Town had a healthy wild streak—and it was in that eclectic, recessionary environment that the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade began.
The Moment
Hamilton was present to witness the first Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade in 1981. “I was busted back then, didn’t have much money,” Hamilton said, “couldn’t go to the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.” He watched as an enthusiastic friend of his, Michael Beck, “got together with two or three little kids from the neighborhood, and they had some drumsticks and cardboard boxes.
“Then they all go marching down the street the Saturday before Mardi Gras, and they just kinda followed each other around. The next year, we had three floats and beads to throw,” Hamilton recalled. That second party was big enough to have a band and a subsequent police-involved finale. Despite how large the parade has grown from these humble beginnings, Hamilton maintains that it began as, and will always remain, a “poor man’s parade.”
Corruption, Theft, and Charity
The year Advocate columnist Smiley Anders (pictured right) was crowned king, he wrote in the paper that he was “selected the usual way—by graft and corruption.”
Former resident and parade Chairman Margo Hicks had a stake in decisions regarding parade royalty for many years. Royal qualifications weren’t that important, but a certain spirit was necessary ... and organizers had fun with it. “We would try to pick a king and a queen sometime in December usually, although there were some years where we kind of ... let people dangle,” Margo recalled, referring to the 1992 parade, themed “Louisiana’s Dirty Laundry,” when Frank Kean (of Kean’s Cleaners) had stated his desire for the crown. “He wanted to be king, so we didn’t want to tell him right away,” Margo continued. “We just let him dangle.” Kean later showed up to the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Ball wearing a Kean’s laundry bag, and Margo knew they had made the right decision.
As for the “graft” part of Smiley Anders’ claim, it is customary for the krewes, each of which has a float in the parade, to bribe an official panel of judges in exchange for special consideration come awards time. In unofficial documentation, Margo Hicks is the “Parade Chairmanissimo for Life,” and she’s accepted her fair share of bribes from behind the judge’s panel. One krewe gifted her a six-foot, one-inch-thick disc made of steel. “One of the krewes worked in metal fabrication and made a coin,” Ted Hicks, Margo’s husband, noted. “Imagine a giant manhole cover.” Originally, the bribe had been placed standing upright in their front yard, but the couple decided to lay it flat out of fear it might fall over on their young child. Ted guesses the gift is still where they left it, only because moving it might require a forklift.
After a few years of this graft and corruption, the paraders decided to be do-gooders, creating a nonprofit organization named the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana. Since incorporating, the organization has donated over $500,000 to local charities, which is impressive for a “poor man’s parade.” They have not, however, put aside the joys of bribery.
“With Dykes and Fairies, Freaks and Hairies”
At many points in the parade’s anything-goes history, spectators have been angered and offended by things they’ve seen. While there is a zone on the parade route where alcohol is prohibited—presumably so families can enjoy the parade without fear of a beer shower—no one has ever tried to label it a family-friendly event. Being parade organizers as well as parents, Ted and Margo admitted that there was a point when they questioned bringing their young children to the event. Ted remembers a specific float to that end; it displayed a forty-foot phallus that ejected little balloons. “That was the year it was kind of like, I can’t let my kids be here anymore,” Ted remarked.
Those festive expressions of humanity didn’t change the couple’s views on what should or shouldn’t be depicted on a float. “Of course, we let them all roll,” Margo said.
“There’s no censorship here,” Ted added, “Only apprehension.”
The couple moved to Hammond in the mid ‘90s, but continued their involvement until relocating to New England a few years later for Ted’s job. They note that the parade has changed flavors a bit over the years. “The neighborhood kids with the boxes and drumsticks—they kind of disappeared after the first couple of years,” Margo said. “Then there were the drag queens; they would show up in, like, black leather and spiked heels, full beards. And we thought they were great, but they dropped out around ‘86 or something. The Advocate [the Los Angeles-based gay magazine, not the Baton Rouge newspaper] felt that the parade was getting way too heterosexual for them.”
“When people started coming in for the parade and getting involved in the organization, it did take a more [heterosexual turn],” Ted explained.
“It was definitely a lot rowdier back then,” admitted former resident and current parade board member, Charles Fisher (pictured right). “We had a lot of fun.” Fisher, also known as “Fish,” is the merry prankster responsible for planting nearly a thousand pink flamingo lawn ornaments around Huey P. Long’s grave and on former Governor Mike Foster’s driveway one year. He orders pink flamingo lighters to pass out to people and has been known to dye his moustache pink in February. Inside two battered scrapbooks, he’s kept hundreds of photos, fliers, inter-krewe memorandums, and newspaper clippings from parades past. While his enthusiasm is full throttle, Fish credits a man named Clyde Carlson for the whole flamingo thing. “Clyde was looking through an Old House Journal and found an ad selling plastic flamingos,” Fish remembered. “We bought in.”
Today, Spanish Town is a vibrant, bustling little place in the middle of a steady restoration, home to the young and not-so-young, the straight and not-so-straight. Things aren’t falling apart anymore, or at least not like they were twenty-five years ago, largely due to the preservation work of the Historic Spanish Town Civic Association. And while the neighborhood has changed, it’s still as eclectic as any other point in its long history.
As I drove away from my interview with Duz Hamilton, I noticed him talking to a woman over a fence on Spanish Town Road. He later told me that he didn’t know the woman, but she had recognized him as a Hamilton. She wanted to let him know that his deceased brother’s cat, which she had adopted thirteen years prior, had died a week ago. “Those are the kind of people that live in Spanish Town,” he said.
