The Jewel of Downtown
At the new Watermark Hotel, a series of panels by Angela Gregory highlight a history of industry and artistry
The twelve-story building on the corner of Third and Convention streets has most likely escaped the attention of visitors to downtown Baton Rouge for decades. Stately but drab, forlorn with unrealized potential, it was originally christened as the Louisiana National Bank building (LNB), in 1925. More recently, it was known as the “SOB” (State Office Building), after the state purchased it in 1970 to house various departments.
Now in its third iteration, the elegant building has been transformed into a posh boutique hotel known as Watermark, a Marriott Autograph Series property. It’s difficult to imagine the travails of state bureaucracy being conducted amid the grandeur of its lovely Classical interior: marble-clad mosaic floors and walls; massive fluted plaster columns; coffered ceilings; a monumental staircase; and the pièce de resistance, eight stunning polychrome bas-relief sculptures on the frieze above the former bank lobby.
These incredibly detailed murals, created using subtractive methods of sculpting, hang above the diners of the hotel’s new Southern-American restaurant and full service bar, The Gregory. The Gregory is named after artist Angela Gregory, the creator of the panels, who was widely considered a trailblazer for her work in a field dominated by men.
Girl Sculptor
Angela Gregory was born in New Orleans in 1903, daughter of a Tulane engineering professor and a Newcomb potter. She graduated from the Art School of Newcomb College in 1925 and went on to become the first person to receive a master’s degree from the Tulane School of Architecture. Upon her graduation, Gregory was awarded a scholarship to the Parson’s School in Paris, where she studied under the famed sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle, a protégé of Auguste Rodin.
Gregory returned to Louisiana in 1928, but after living in 1920s Paris, the New Orleans she returned to seemed devoid of artistic inspiration and rife with oppressive heat and humidity. She pressed on, fostering a creative environment in her home studio in Uptown New Orleans, surrounding herself with artists and writers who would eventually change the face of the city into an arts mecca. She quickly became a renowned sculptor and painter, breaking through the gender barrier so prevalent at the time. But it was her public works projects, present in the most important buildings being constructed around the state at that time, that put her on the map.
The “Jewel of the Property”
Built in the early 1920s, LNB was Baton Rouge’s first “high rise” in the downtown business district. Though constructed in the Art Deco era, the building itself represents Neo-Classical architecture at its best: understated and streamlined, yet traditional in details and style.
It was after WWII, as part of a 1948—49 renovation that saw the addition of modern details to the LNB building, when Gregory was commissioned to create the murals. During the renovations, the second floor balcony was enclosed, creating an opportunity for the owners to commission artwork that would draw connections between Louisiana and the banking industry. The panels’ large six-foot-by-twenty-foot size was employed as an architectural feature to conceal the previous second floor and to draw the eye upward, fifteen feet above the floor.
The Louisiana of 1948 had undergone significant modernization, and the visionary bankers wanted to celebrate that progress. Gregory was asked to create eight murals depicting various aspects of Louisiana commerce such as cotton farming, logging, shipping, railroads, aviation, petroleum, sugar refining, and, of course, Louisiana State University. Other iconic themes include the Old Mississippi River Bridge and the Louisiana Purchase.
Detailed imagery of cypress trees draped with Spanish moss, acres of sugar cane fields, a mother pelican and her nestlings, and jaunty palmetto fronds adorn each panel, creating a visual feast of Louisiana culture. The resulting works are colorful and expressive, with a crisp modernity that hearkens back to Gregory’s days as a supervisor for the Works Project Administration.
When Ann Connelly, the art consultant on the building’s current renovation, declared the murals the “jewel of the property,” owner and developer Mike Wampold decided to spend considerable effort making them and the artist the main focus of the hotel visitor’s experience. He arranged to have the panels restored to their original grandeur.
Elise Grenier, the project’s art restoration consultant, found the panels in decent condition but not without damage from moisture and mechanical etching from ventilation systems that, over the years, had created salt blooms and discoloration. Atmospheric agents and air currents (read: too much air conditioning) caused “mechanical abrasion, blistering, and detachment of both the plaster and the paint layer, resulting in losses in all strata,” according to Grenier. After careful handling by the experts and craftspeople, the murals once again render beautifully the bankers’ original intention: state pride.
The Hotel
Wampold Companies has a reputation for creating landmark businesses out of left-behind structures. The company’s previous work with the Marriott Autograph Series includes the Renaissance Baton Rouge Hotel on Bluebonnet Boulevard, where they created an upscale lodging experience from an unfinished dormitory structure, empty for over twenty years. They’ve done it again with the Watermark.
When the LNB building underwent renovation in 1948—49, modern design details were added which today help to inform the overall interior design concept, creating a complex layering of aesthetic elements. Hallmarks of the Classical style were employed throughout the original building, such as Carrara marble arches and a majestic book-matched stone, all retained today as the wall décor in the new meeting rooms on the basement level. Because of the historic nature of the building and its designation within a National Historic District, certain architectural elements were preserved; but most of the upper story walls were removed.
The name of the hotel draws upon the identity of the building as a decades-old banking institution and upon its close proximity to and view of the Mississippi River. Looking out from the upper story windows, the view across the Shaw Center of the Arts to the bridge is remarkable. With 144 rooms, nothing about the hotel interior is average.
Rooms on the upper floors boast jewel-like custom lighting fixtures, plush indigo carpeting, walls covered in subtle metallic graphics, and bespoke wardrobes clad in a gold tone sheen and metal mesh. The guest room doors resemble those of old vaults as a nod to the massive receptacles in the basement which once contained the assets of the Baton Rouge business community, tying industrial symbolism into the building.
A sense of whimsy was handily employed by the interior designer, Doug Detivaux of Gensler Associates, to enhance an otherwise dowdy old bank building. He and Connelly inserted a sense of Louisiana’s colorful history through the use of sculpture, photography, and “larger than life” lenticular prints that play two-dimensional tricks on the eye in the entry vestibule.
The personal influence of owner-developer Wampold is evident in the naming of the New York-style deli, Milford’s on Third, an homage to Wampold’s grandfather, Milford Wampold, who owned a grocery with a deli counter in north Louisiana. These personal touches, so rare in typical chain restaurants and lodging establishments, set Watermark apart.
What’s sure to be a guest favorite is the room located directly above the grand entrance on the second floor. In this space, a massive arched metal window greets the street and one feels momentarily transported to a posh Manhattan enclave. In fact, the entire building is unlike anything Baton Rouge has ever seen. It’s about as urban as one can get in this downtown down South by the river.