Shreveport, aka the Queen City of the Southwest, as investor and booster Baylor Culpeper called her, is reviving in stages, and the good news is that this old lady is being renovated.
This "old lady" is a beaux-arts style building once known as the Arlington Hotel in downtown Shreveport at Cotton and McNeil Streets, which was owned by W.M. Comegys and managed by the aforementioned Culpeper. In 1937, Culpeper signed a 99 year lease with Comegys for the hotel, which showed both Culpeper's confidence and the reason why the city became the hotel's owner in the latter 20th century.
Opened in 1914, the Arlington Hotel was at least raided once due to bootlegging. Lots of nightlife and retail shops surrounded it, which was just a block or two away from Union Station. It was not just a hotel, either, but a safe place for single woman who roomed and boarded there. The employees formed a champion bowling league in the 1940s.
By the 1970s, however, the area became more derelict as that infernal Interstate 20 siphoned the life from downtown Shreveport. The Arlington Hotel served as a flophouse that brought, according to a newspaper ad, "$1500 per month in gross rentals." In 1972, the building and all of its fixtures were for sale. There's nothing wrong with flophouses, though. Everyone deserves a place to land.
The dissolution of the lease due to deaths and the hotel's downgrade left it in receivership, and the city purchased the building to reclaim the lot. The city of Shreveport thus sold the Arlington in a sealed bid in 2019. I read that a brewery is wanting to open here. That would be wonderful.
