re: For those of you who lived in the stadium dorms back in the day...

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When Death Valley had dorms: Why living in Tiger Stadium wasn't as glamorous as you think.
By REED DARCEY | Staff writer Oct 3, 2024

In Tiger Stadium’s dorm rooms — or what’s left of them — someone removed the furniture and knocked down the walls. But they left the radiators. Even today, some of those dated contraptions are still connected to gas lines that run next to the stadium’s north-side windows.

The light switches still dangle from the concrete ceilings. On the third floor, there’s a pile of wires sitting on the ground a few feet in front of an old air duct that has pink insulation bursting out of each end. The floor tiles are gone, but the old rusty light fixtures are not. Some even still have their long fluorescent lightbulbs, which burned out long ago.

Graffiti still sullies a few walls, and gaps in the rooms' concrete baseboards sit in the spots where doors once swung open and shut.

Walk down what used to be the dorm’s hallway, peer through a dirty window with jagged, broken glass, and you’ll see the ramps that lead to the stadium’s north-side bleachers. Thousands of fans stream up and down that concourse every time LSU plays a home game. They've done so since U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, moved into a fourth-floor stadium dorm in 1984.

“It was not one of the premier dorms on campus,” Scalise told The Advocate. “But I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.”

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More than 70 years ago, a student walked down a Tiger Stadium hallway and slid a note under the door of AP Tureaud’s dorm room. He didn’t want to meet. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to lend support to a classmate who was struggling — but he chose to do so from afar.

It was 1953, and Tureaud, LSU’s first Black undergraduate student, had recently enrolled at the university, beginning a nightmarish six-week stay on a campus that rejected him. Like thousands of students who attended LSU from 1932-1987, Tureaud lived inside Tiger Stadium, which has now housed 100 seasons of football games.

So, there’s history in Death Valley. Most of it resides on the grass — think Halloween touchdown runs and earth-shaking scoring grabs — but there’s more buried in the concrete and steel, hidden behind busted windows that separate Tiger Stadium’s present from relics of its past.

Fans and students walk through the stadium’s recesses every game day, but how many of them know about the history stored behind those walls?

“The worst part of my experience,” Tureaud said, “was what I was facing in my dorm room constantly.”

BR.tigerstadiumdorms.100624.06.JPG
A look inside the abandoned Tiger Stadium dorms as seen on Tuesday, October 1, 2024.

Javier Gallegos
Tureaud, 89, lived in the fifth-floor barracks on the north side of Tiger Stadium. When he first moved in, he had a wide three-bed space to himself. Down the hallway, around 30 freshmen students lined up, as part of a yearly ritual, waiting for upperclassmen to give them bad haircuts to pair with the beanies and pajamas they’d wear to football games.

They were laughing and joking among themselves. But they ignored Tureaud.

Then, when Tureaud would walk into the communal restrooms to shower, brush his teeth or shave, the students already in there would walk out — naked, wet and soaped — and use another bathroom.

At night, they’d bang on Tureaud’s walls, he remembers, and blast their radios. Some dumped roadkill at his doorstep. Others spread feces near his room.

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