CROWLEY, La. (WAFB) – This may be the only city hall where you can see vintage cars on display and a recording studio that turned out early south Louisiana music. Rather than putting a museum in city hall, it’s really a city hall built into a museum.
“It was not only a way to kind of preserve the history in Crowley, but it was also a way to get the grant money and the funding we needed to create this space,” said Claire Dore’, a historian at the Acadia Parish Library.
Crowley, located in Louisiana’s rice farming country, as one of those well-preserved main streets. That’s once again thriving with new businesses. It started with the reopening of the 1901 Grand Opera House of the South on North Parkinson Street. Then the old Ford motor company building next door, complete with the elevator and tracks used to assemble Model T cars, became the new city hall. And that drew other businesses downtown…