Cash Grocery & Sales Company Warehouse

The warehouse at 801 Enterprise Boulevard sold wholesale goods to small grocers and other businesses the way a Sam's Club does now — bulk quantities, cash transaction, walk out with what you came for. Built around 1937 and designed by Lewis Dunn of Dunn & Quinn, the 9,600-square-foot building may have been constructed by Robert Thibodeaux. It closed in 1992. Rich and Donna Richard bought it in 2007. The Louisiana Trust for Historical Preservation gave them a 2009 Honor Award for the preservation work. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. Before that rescue, the Calcasieu Historical Preservation Society had named it to its "Most Endangered Sites List," and its architectural detail was studied under a "Vanishing History" program grant from the National Park Service and the Louisiana Office of Cultural Development for fifth graders. What you're looking at is a working piece of Lake Charles's wholesale distribution past, the kind of infrastructure that made a city on the Calcasieu River a logistics center before the interstate formalized it.