It wasn’t your garden-variety Mother’s Day.
About noon on May 13, Becky Ford left her home in Denham Springs with her daughter Holly and drove to Baton Rouge to pick up her teenage son C. J., who had attended a sleepover.
Heading up Airline Highway, Ford spied the Bellemont Hotel, where demolition was to start the next day. The once-elegant “motor hotel” had been on a downhill slide for at least a decade.
Built in 1946 by developer A. C. Lewis and his partner Jamar Adcock, the hotel was the place to stay in Baton Rouge. A 1953 ad in the Morning Advocate touted its “150 Luxurious Rooms and 150 Tile Baths.” Amenities included “telephones in every room, Simmons Beautyrest mattresses, refrigerated air conditioning, and sterilized water glasses.” Rooms cost $2.50 per night.
“The Bellemont is where everybody wants to go—to see and be seen,” asserted society magazine The Register.
In its heyday, college football teams in town to play LSU roamed its halls, swam in its pool, and reportedly made off with its linens. Starting in 1949, casts and crews of films shot on location stayed there—including Clark Gable, Orson Welles, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, and Richard Pryor.
Ford knew little of that history, but she had heard about the demolition on television and seen photos of the hotel on the website Abandoned Baton Rouge (ABR). Photographer Colleen Kane (who now lives in Brooklyn) had blogged about the Bellemont since 2008.
“She had stunning pictures that made you think about its history, and the sadness of this place just sitting there,” says Ford. “I thought maybe I could take pictures and share them on ABR.”
So on Mother’s Day, with kids in tow, Ford pulled into the parking lot behind the hotel complex, located on a sprawling eighteen acres. “The kids thought I was crazy,” she says. “People clearly had been living in the abandoned rooms. There was a barbeque pit outside one of them.”
As they cautiously canvassed the area, Ford spied a pickup truck with a man inside eating lunch. “I identified myself and asked if I could take some photos,” she says.
The man climbed out of the truck. “He wore mirrored sunglasses, a baseball cap, and earrings made out of hooks,” says Ford. “He had tattoos on his arms and a gun in his back pocket. I thought, ‘Omigod, this guy’s gonna kill us!’ But the kids thought he was so cool. He had this tough exterior, but I could tell he was sad about this particular job.”
Charlie Hayden, co-owner of the demolition company Busted Knuckle Field Services, left his lunch and took Ford and her kids on a tour of the Bellemont, which comprised about 250 rooms, many recently occupied by squatters.
“We poked our heads in and took pictures with our phones,” says Ford. “There were teddy bears, clothes, discarded food containers. The smell was overwhelming—mold, toilets that no longer worked. All of the furniture was still in the rooms, almost as if one day everybody just—poof—evaporated.
The focal point of the hotel was the Great Hall, a huge structure added in 1984. Ads boasted that it was fit for “dinner for two or two thousand.”
“People had stacked furniture and climbed up and cut holes in the ceiling of the Great Hall to steal the copper,” says Ford. “We saw vandalism and disrepair, but it still seemed fixable.” In fact, the owners planned to salvage the Great Hall. But as the extent of the damage became evident, they later decided to tear it down.
At one point, says Ford, “Charlie pointed out the Pan American Suite, but he called it the honeymoon suite. I didn’t know the significance of it then.”
Ford, who studied business administration at LSU and works as a blogger for a shopping website, also has a passion for history. After a couple of hours at the Bellemont, she was smitten. The next week, she went back with her husband Chris to take photos with a “real camera.” Meanwhile, she hit the library, ferreting out articles and riffling through vertical files. She found a book of reminiscences by a former bellhop and ordered a copy online.
By late May, she had started a Facebook page. To date some two hundred people have “liked” the page, posting memories and photos of proms, weddings, and even funerals. (Blues great Raful Neal’s service was held there in 2004.) Through the site Ford found former Bellemont employees, including 87-year-old Howard McBride, who served as general manager of the hotel from 1962 until 1978.
She learned that the crown jewel had been the Pan American Suite, which opened in 1957. Its windows overlooked a huge mural whose colorful tiles were reflected in a private amoeba-shaped pool. “The color of the mosaic in the pool patio lights the living room and cheers the entire suite,” rhapsodized The Register.
The suite rented for $150 a night. “That’s about twelve hundred in today’s dollars,” says Ford. “This was the playground of the rich and famous.”
Indeed it was. Actor Steve McQueen rode his motorcycle into the suite and dripped oil on the carpet, according to Ford, who heard that story from McBride.
Intrigued, Ford was determined to find and photograph the mosaic mural. When she found it, it was so covered with fig vine that she could barely glimpse a few bright blue tiles through the greenery.
Some two weeks after first setting eyes on the place, Ford and her son C. J. returned to the Bellemont with two sets of hedge clippers bought especially for the occasion. With the help of Facebook friend Todd Gilly, they yanked away the vine that covered the seventeen-by-eighteen-foot mural. They cleared a space about six by ten feet and photographed it, but Ford was obsessed. She wanted to see the whole thing.
She talked to Patrick Jeansonne, co-owner of the demolition company, and offered to pay his workers to clear the rest of the mural so she could photograph it. Four workers attacked the vegetation and used a chainsaw to cut away a tree in front of the mural. Sixteen man hours and $230 later, Ford gazed upon the complete mural in all its glory. Its bright blues, yellows, and oranges depicted semiabstract images of the sun, a crab, and a bird.
Ford was seized with the notion of saving the mural from the wrecking ball. But was it possible? It was huge, and it was attached to a brick or cinderblock wall. Jeansonne estimated it would cost $40,000 to remove it and transport it to another location—if one could be found.
Ford appealed to the media. WAFB-TV did a couple of reports, and The Advocate ran a story on her quest to save the mural. She and Gilly did separate radio interviews, hoping to reach somebody somewhere with the means to rescue the mural.
Two experts from the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism visited the site with Ford, climbing over brick and cinder-block rubble, and discovered that the mural is attached with mortar to heavy-duty wire mesh attached to cinder blocks with more mortar. They said it was salvageable and that it would probably cost five or ten thousand dollars to remove and relocate it.
Meanwhile, Ford tried to identify the artist who had created the unsigned piece back in 1957. She thought it might have been Patricia Bradley Harper, who painted several murals for the Bellemont’s interior, including one of Billy Cannon and Warren Rabb’s goal-line stand that preserved LSU’s 7-3 victory over Ole Miss on Halloween Night 1959.
She also boned up on the sad history of the hotel, which had declined with the advent of the interstate. Lewis died in 1985 at age 67, and the following year the property went bankrupt. It changed hands a couple of times before it was purchased by Joseph Calloway in 2009. Calloway decided to demolish it this year.
Ford has devoted hours to saving the mural but is resigned to the possibility that it might be a hopeless task. If nothing else she hopes to salvage a piece of the wall. And she has other souvenirs—room keys with the capital B on them, glass pieces from a chandelier, a waste can with the Bellemont name on it, and a black cast-iron lamp that hung outside a room. Most treasured is a large black and white photo of the hotel in its glory days.
Her Facebook page continues to gain new fans posting old memories. “There are truly enough stories to fill a book,” says Ford. “And I intend to do just that.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. To visit Ford’s Facebook page on the Bellemont, go to http://www.facebook.com/TheBellemont.
