Downtown YMCA

Clarence W. King of the firm Peyton and King took the Villa Medici in Rome as his model for the Y that opened in 1925. The Italian Renaissance Revival building has blond brick and cast concrete walls, twin campaniles joined by a balustrade, gold and blue terra cotta, a lobby with a plaster groin-vaulted ceiling and a small courtyard with a fountain. It first held two gymnasiums, bedrooms and a basement pool. Two stories of bedrooms were added in the 1960s, and in 2017 workers found Cold War civil defense food barrels from 1963 in an unused wing.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Street Museum — steps away
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.3 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.5 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 3.0 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Hutchinson Building — steps away
• Caddo Parish Courthouse — steps away
• Shreve Memorial Library — steps away
• Holy Trinity Catholic Church — steps away