An eight-ton piece of public art and relic from Lafayette’s commercial past is safe in a city warehouse today after a crew used cranes to gently hoist the concrete sculpture onto a flatbed trailer and take it safely away.
Until Wednesday, Robert Wiggs’ Twisted Loop, along with a line of broken bricks and clawed-up earth, was the only evidence left of the dilapidated LBA Savings Bank drive-thru on Vermilion Street between the old Lafayette Hardware Store building and the Acadiana Center for the Arts downtown. The drive-thru was demolished to make way for a theatre expansion to the AcA.
According to Wiggs, a retired UL art professor, the piece was commissioned in 1970. Wiggs, with the help of friend Mike Stansbury, constructed the sculpture on-location. Twisted Loop will be relocated to the traffic island on Congress Street between the Lafayette Public Library and the IberiaBank building within the next few weeks. For more on this historic preservation project, read “Saved from the wrecking ball: Downtown public art spared” (March 31).
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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