Home for generations

• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 28, 2009 - Page: 1D

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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