re: Which LA parish courthouses have you been in?

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eauregard probably looks the coolest from an architectural standpoint, and being adjacent to the old gothic jail is a nice touch as well. Definitely my favorite from the outside.

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That much cooler that they are connected by an underground tunnel as well.

Pic of jail:

Plaquemine Parish is a mess. They have a crummy old building for one court room and a couple miles away the other courtroom is in a crummy prefab building

The strip mall courthouse in St. Bernard during the remediation/renovation was interesting.
In the newly renovated Courthouse they have an old toilet with a foot lever for flushing that has to be over 50 years old.

All 64. Bienville's new courthouse is really nice.

You guys simply must check out St. Helena's. Don't think that a thing about it has changed since the '30's.

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47 courthouses but not CDC is impressive.

Almost all in the southeast and those surrounding BR

My job requires it though.

Jury duty summons EBR. Luckily I got out of it cuz I'm a LSU student

St. Landry Parish. Something cool I learned while I was up there for work once is that there is a very small 4th or 5th floor to the courthouse that is not really shown on any set of plans. I was up on the second highest floor doing some work and had the building plans that were registered with the parish and on the floor I was on, there was a staircase going up that was also shown on the plans but the floor above was nowhere to be seen on the prints.

Turns out that the very top floor was pretty much only a single room and was only 15'x15' or so. There was nothing in the one room at the top except the fairly obvious trap door right in the center of it, a bigass steel hook directly above it to tie the rope to, and a shitload of old paper records the parish stored up there. The thirteenth stair at the top of the stairwell was a different color than all the rest, black I think. The story I was told was that the room was definitely for hanging prisoners back when the condemned were executed in the parish they were convicted in and it intentionally wasn't shown on the plans registered with the Parish. That different colored step meant your arse if you were condemned and crossed it because at that point, nothing could stop the execution and the only way you were coming down was at the end of a rope.

Pretty neat actually. The trustees that I had with me absolutely refused to go anywhere near that staircase. They just hung back and waited for me to finish exploring.