"It's where we gathered," said Huel Perkins, assis- tant to LSU's chancellor and a member of an old Baton Rouge family.
"What I remember from any social event among blacks is the Temple Roof Garden."
The Roof Garden was a large room on the top floor of the North Boulevard building, where during the 1930s and '40s many of the major black entertainers performed. Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, King Oliver, Louis Jordan and, later, Ike and Tina Turner were a few of the world - class entertain- ers who stopped at the Temple over the years. "When they came to town, there was such excite- ment. People who couldn't get in parked outside and just listened," Perkins said. Baton Rouge was smaller then, and the location of the Temple at 1333 North Blvd. was the center of town. People came to the Roof Garden to dance to the mu- sic on the hardwood floors. They even danced on the balconies that surround three walls of the large room. The Temple was built in 1924 and 1925 as the Dis- trict Grand Lodge No. 21 of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows. The building, which was dedicated in 1926, was designed by white architects Wogan & Bernard and built by African - American general con- tractors Conner, Bryant and Bell. Frank Johnson, 102, who still lives near the Temple, did the stone work on the building as well as work on the Bentley Hotel in Alexandria, the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas and the Omni Shoreham in Washington,
D.C.
"He's the only one of the original workers on the building still living," said Robert Buffington, grand secretary of the M.W. Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Louisiana, which in 1948 purchased the building from the Odd Fellows for $42,976.66. The building is built of steel and concrete, so well built that during World War II it was declared an offi- cial bomb shelter. "I understood that they almost put the building up for cash," said Buffington, whose family has been associ- ated with the Temple since its beginning.
The late B.V. Baranco Sr., a prominent black commu-
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