A Day in Downtown Baton Rouge

With a combination of spacious green areas and stately buildings, downtown Baton Rouge is definitely worth visiting.

Less than an hour and a half from New Orleans, Baton Rouge is the Louisiana State Capital and sits right on the Mississippi River. If you are traveling along I-10, you can’t miss it! I definitely recommend visiting New Orleans and Baton Rouge in the same trip, because both cities have a lot to offer. Click here for my guide to a day in New Orleans.

Whereas New Orleans is a crowded patchwork of narrow streets, I fell in love with Baton Rouge’s wide lanes lined with beautiful mossy oaks. The trees are lifesavers in the summer heat, and provide a lot of shade when strolling through downtown. Downtown Baton Rouge was surprisingly quiet and empty the day that I visited, but it might have been because it was nearly 100°F (too hot to be walking around a city for hours, but we did it anyway.)

My Day in Baton Rouge

Brockie and I started off the day by finding some place with wifi so I could get some online work done. (Freelancing and blogging while on a road trip means stopping at a LOT of coffee shops. I’m at another one right now as I’m writing this blog post.) We settled on Coffee Joy, a bright and minimalist coffee shop conveniently located just off of I-10. After an hour or two of sipping on my lavender cold brew and doing some work, we left the coffee shop and decided to find a bookstore. We stopped by Red Stick Reads, a small boutique bookstore with a cool owner and tasteful selection of both used and new books. If you’re driving through Baton Rouge, swing by and find a book to read on the rest of your road trip!

Back to touring the city…Brockie and I parked down at the Mississippi River Park and spent some time walking along the river. In hindsight, considering how much walking we ended up doing, I would suggest parking somewhere closer to the center of downtown Baton Rouge. You can drive to the River Park separately instead of walking there from downtown.

After some time at the river, we headed up to the Old State Capitol. We pretty much just went for the prettiest building we saw. After touring the Old State Capitol, we spent some time just walking around downtown and taking pictures of old churches. The streets were surprisingly empty for a Saturday, or maybe Baton Rouge is just a really quiet, chill city. Either way, it was a welcome break from the loudness and busyness of New Orleans.

Chill at The Vintage & enjoy some beignets

We stopped by The Vintage for a late lunch and beignets. Apparently it’s the place to be in downtown Baton Rouge, because it was the liveliest café we found. The Vintage is a coffee shop, café, and bar all wrapped into one. You can opt for a cocktail and panini, or coffee and beignets…whatever you’re in the mood for!

To wrap up our day in Baton Rouge, we made a quick visit to the ‘new’ State Capitol building. Not that it’s new—it was completed in 1931—but it’s the second Capitol building in Baton Rouge and replaced the Old Capitol.

 City Highlights: the State Capitol buildings

Old Capitol building

The old Baton Rouge State Capitol building looks like a castle. Designed by architect James Dakin, the Capitol is a fine example of gothic architecture. Unfortunately, the beautiful building was only in use for about 12 years, when the interior was burned during the Union occupation of Baton Rouge in the Civil War. After the building was restored in the 1880’s, the Old Capitol was in use once more, although it suffered another interior fire in 1906. In 1930 Louisiana began construction on a new Capitol, and the Old was eventually converted into a museum.

The Old State Capitol is open for free self-guided tours. The bottom floor contains several historic exhibits, while the second floor is open for you to walk through. (Third floor is off limits.) You can stand in the chamber where Louisiana officially seceded from the Union, and marvel at the colorful stained glass ceiling and windows. While most of the old building has been restored, there is one window where they left a portion of the original frame, and you can see the contrast between the restored wood and the charred wood.

Old Capitol interior

As for the New Capitol, I guess Louisiana decided they needed to go big to top the Old…because it’s the tallest Capitol building in the USA! At 450 feet, it stands out from the rest of downtown Baton Rouge and forms an impressive landmark.

The State Capitol features a garden in the front and a lake in the back, surrounding the tall building with greenery. You can stroll through the gardens and take a walk around the lake before circling back to downtown.

Together, the Capitol buildings are the main highlights of downtown Baton Rouge. Then again, I really like beautiful historic buildings, so I might be a little bit biased. Whether you like history or not, be sure to stop by the Capitols when you visit downtown Baton Rouge, even if you don’t make it anywhere else in the city.