The men who chartered the Hoo Shoo Too club in 1915 wanted exactly one thing: to get away from Baton Rouge. They rode out on the road that would later carry their name, past what was then called Clark Road, toward the banks of the Amite River, specifically because it felt like it was "out of civilization." A century later, that same stretch of road is where East Baton Rouge Parish is arguing over whether to add nearly 200 more houses.
If you live inside the gates at Mallard Lakes, this is worth knowing not because it changes anything about your address today, but because it explains the low hum of activity you may have started to notice at your own corner.
A Road Named to Get Away From All This
The Hoo Shoo Too club formally organized on June 8, 1915, though its members had been making the trip since 1885. They were business and professional men from the Capital City who treated the drive out to the river as a standing appointment, a chance to fish, drink, and put some distance between themselves and town. There are two competing stories about where the odd name came from, one involving a French caretaker who didn't recognize a member's wife and asked "Who she to?", the other tracing back to a 1905 minstrel show line performed in exaggerated Cajun dialect. Either way, the club kept a campsite with a clubhouse and dining hall on roughly 15 acres at the end of the road until it folded in 1980, done in by changing times more than anything dramatic.
That history matters here because Mallard Lakes sits on the same road those men built their escape route on. The neighborhood's own character, gated entry, a 30-plus acre lake at its center, home sites running from about four acres up past sixty, was built on the same premise the club was: distance from the city, without giving up easy access to it. For most of the two decades since the subdivision was developed, that premise held. Now it's being tested at the exact intersection where Hoo Shoo Too meets South Tiger Bend Road.
The Corner That's Filling In
In April 2022, East Baton Rouge's Metro Council voted 8 to 3 to rezone land near that intersection from agricultural rural to residential, clearing the way for what became known as the Woodhill Subdivision, nearly 200 single-family homes on roughly 60 acres that had sat undeveloped. The Planning Commission's own staff had recommended denial, arguing the project didn't match the area's rural character of larger homes on wide lots. The commission approved it anyway.
The opposition wasn't about aesthetics. About 30 percent of the property falls within a flood zone, and the land abuts Bayou Manchac, a waterway city officials have identified as still needing flood mitigation work even during ordinary heavy rain. Residents who'd lived through the 2016 floods showed up to describe what more rooftops and more pavement could mean for water that already has trouble finding somewhere to go.
"I was very disappointed in the lack of discussion and seemingly lack of concern from constituents about the case."
That's Councilman Dwight Hudson, who represented the area, reacting in an Advocate report to how little debate the rezoning actually got before it passed. The developer had commissioned its own traffic study, not required by the parish, and concluded the project wouldn't need significant upgrades where Hoo Shoo Too meets the state highway. Whether that holds up once construction traffic and then daily commuter traffic are added to a road that was laid out for a fishing club's Sunday drives is the open question nobody has fully answered yet.
The Road Itself Hasn't Caught Up
Hoo Shoo Too Road is listed on East Baton Rouge's MOVEBR capital improvement program, the parish's long-running effort to widen and modernize its most strained corridors. When the Woodhill rezoning was under debate back in 2022, the road carried a Tier 3 classification, the tier with no confirmed start date, a designation that has a track record in this parish of stalling out entirely under prior improvement plans before eventually moving forward. Four years later, MOVEBR's own project page for the stretch of Hoo Shoo Too Road from Jefferson Highway to Tiger Bend still does not list a construction timeline.
Put plainly: the parish approved several hundred more households near this intersection before it committed to a schedule for widening the two-lane road they'll all be using to get in and out. That gap between rezoning and road capacity is not unique to this corner of the parish, but it's the specific gap that Mallard Lakes residents are positioned to feel first, since the neighborhood's own entrance sits on the same road.
The First Real Coffee Shop the Corner Has Had
Not everything filling in around Hoo Shoo Too Road is a zoning fight. This summer, Café Verdino opened in a shopping center right at the corner of Jones Creek and Tiger Bend roads, the intersection closest to Mallard Lakes' gates. Owner Ege Oral, who moved to Baton Rouge from Turkey about a year earlier to join family, said he'd noticed there wasn't a coffee house in the immediate area and built one with a Mediterranean lean, Lavazza espresso, Torani syrups, and a green-toned interior that gives the shop its name. The menu runs toward the straightforward end on purpose. Oral has said his preference is for classic drinks made well rather than elaborate ones, and the breakfast and lunch options, egg-and-cheese biscuits, tartines, a Greek-style salad, are built around the same idea.
It's a small thing, one coffee shop in a strip center, but it's also a signal. New retail tends to follow rooftops, not the other way around, and a first-time entrepreneur opening his first business at this particular corner is a bet that more people are going to be driving past it soon.
For longtime residents, that new counter sits down the road from an older anchor. Jones Creek Cafe & Oyster Bar, a seafood spot known locally for its fried oyster and softshell crab po-boys, has been a fixture in the Hoo Shoo Too, Long Farm, and Hunter's Glen area long enough that Nextdoor neighbors list it as their default recommendation when someone asks where to eat nearby. The contrast between an established po-boy counter and a brand-new espresso bar a few minutes apart is a fair snapshot of where this corridor is right now: old habits still holding, new commerce arriving to meet demand that hasn't fully shown up yet.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this changes what Mallard Lakes is today. The gates are still there, and the 30-plus acre lake at the center of the property still belongs to the same handful of estate lots it always has. What's changed is the road those gates open onto. It carries a name born from wanting distance from town, and it's now the same road absorbing the parish's next round of subdivisions, still without a scheduled fix for the two lanes that have to carry all of it.
If you've noticed more cars at the Tiger Bend intersection, or a new coffee shop where there used to be an empty storefront, you weren't imagining a shift. You were watching the early, unremarkable part of one. Whether the county follows through on widening Hoo Shoo Too Road before Woodhill's homes are all occupied is the detail worth watching over the next few years, not because it threatens the neighborhood behind the gates, but because it's the clearest evidence yet that the quiet this area has traded on for two decades was never guaranteed to be permanent.
If you're curious how corridors like this one tend to evolve, or what a road's history can tell you about where it's headed next, Del Rio Real Estate has spent decades tracking exactly these kinds of shifts across Baton Rouge's established neighborhoods. Schedule a private consultation when you're ready to talk through what you're seeing.
