The Worlds Longest Dept. Store. Traditional Cache
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The Worlds Longest Dept. Store.
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Should be plenty place to park!
“The world’s longest department store,” the flagship Goudchaux’s at 1500 Main Street just east of downtown Baton Rouge, was first constructed in the late 1930s, with the original structure then being expanded upon/renovated at various times throughout the years (usually at five year intervals).
The present structure is two stories tall, with an adjacent 4-story warehouse attached on the west end. Because of limited space in the inner city and the importance of the bordering east-to-west streets as traffic thoroughfares, the nature of the expansion of the store was to grow lengthwise in the block between Main and Laurel Streets, parallel to those streets, eventually stretching for 2½ blocks from the KCS railroad line eastward across the rights-of-way of North 15th, 16th, and 17th Streets for 971 feet.
This unusual shape gave rise to the nickname “the world’s longest department store.”
From the earliest, the Goudchaux’s management had recognized the value of free, convenient parking and provided ample amounts of it, so that today whole blocks or parts of the blocks surrounding the store to the east (up to North 18th Street) and south (up to Florida Street) are comprised of surface parking lots. From at least the 1950s onward, Goudchaux’s also operated a car care center on the corner of Florida and N. 15th Streets (1501 Florida), about a block from the main structure. This building remains in commerce today as an auto repair and service shop.
However, fate has, at least temporarily, altered future plans for the former store. After Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 and devastated the Gulf Coast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), charged to deal with the disaster, faced massive manpower needs and consequently space needs. Quickly they leased the entirety of the 1500 Main structure for the duration of the emergency, to house their emergency operations center. As of to-day, they are still occupying the structure. The emergency workers have long since departed, so the building now houses an army of post-disaster FEMAcrats, not just to deal with lingering poast-K issues, but to be on call when the next tropical chaos strikes.
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