Chain restaurants and subdivision after subdivision are replacing the crawfish ponds and open fields that longtime residents remember. Are old-timers right to be alarmed, or is growth just the price of progress?
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Add your commentBorn and raised on Burnside Road, and I'll tell you exactly what happened — the moment they widened Highway 30 and put in that second Chick-fil-A, it was over. My daddy used to drive me past crawfish ponds all the way to school. Now it's a Hobby Lobby and three more nail salons. Progress? Sure. But don't call it Gonzales anymore. Call it South Baton Rouge and be honest about it.
The old-timers are right but also partly to blame, respectfully. A lot of those crawfish ponds and open fields were sold by local families who took the developer money and retired to Florida. Hard to complain about sprawl when your cousin signed the act of sale.
Here's a fact people forget: Gonzales has been called the Jambalaya Capital of the World since like the 1960s. The festival, the culture, the cooking — none of that went anywhere. My aunt still makes a roux the same way her mother did in Prairieville. A Raising Cane's on the corner doesn't erase that unless YOU let it.
Genuinely funny to me that people are nostalgic for open fields when half those fields flooded your living room every other August. I'll take the Target and the slightly better drainage any day. Nostalgia is a luxury when you've mopped mud out of your kitchen twice in five years.
ok but can we talk about how the traffic on Airline Hwy at 5pm is genuinely a mental health crisis at this point. i sat through four light cycles at the Tanger outlet exit last tuesday. FOUR. this isnt small town OR big city, its just the worst of both
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Gonzales get incorporated way later than that — like the 1950s or something? Either way my real question is this: where is the city council actually on any of this? I have been to THREE parish planning meetings and the development approvals just keep coming with zero conversation about infrastructure. Roads, drainage, schools — anybody home??
I used to live there before relocating to Covington and I miss the version of Gonzales that existed around 2003-2004. Small enough that everybody at the Winn-Dixie knew your mama. Big enough to have decent boudin from that little spot off 44. That balance is genuinely gone and I dont think its coming back and yeah, it stings a little more than I expected it to when I drive through now.
Moved here from Metairie about six years ago specifically BECAUSE of the growth. Good schools, newer housing, close enough to BR for work. Sorry if that makes me the villain in this story but my kids have a better quality of life here than we did. Not everyone mourning the crawfish ponds actually grew up knee-deep in them.
Gonzales was actually incorporated in 1922, making it one of the oldest municipalities in all of Louisiana, so this idea that it was ever just some sleepy nothing town is revisionist history. It has always been a trade hub for Ascension Parish. Growth is literally in its DNA people.
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