Where Is Downtown Baton Rouge?

While driving along Interstate 110 the other day, I noticed a sign that said “Downtown.” The familiar green and white Interstate directional marker also had an arrow pointing toward the Mississippi River.

It made me stop and think about what Baton Rouge residents call “downtown.” The dictionary defines downtown as the “business center of a city.” You could also think of it as the center of population in an area, where the people gather to shop, see movies, congregate for dinner and drop in on a few retail stores.

If you stop to think about it, what Baton Rouge residents call Downtown Baton Rouge ceased being a typical downtown in the mid-1950s. Despite valiant efforts by owners of property between I-110 and the Mississippi, and between the Old and New State Capitols, the closest thing Baton Rouge has to a real downtown is located at the intersection of I-10 and Bluebonnet.

Just think about it. The largest hospital in the state is no longer on the lake behind the state capitol building. It is located on Essen Lane (and how long has it been since Essen was a lane, I ask you?). Of course our town’s other two large hospitals are also right there.

The daily newspaper office is also something you would typically find smack in the middle of a city’s downtown. That’s why The Advocate moved to Bluebonnet a few years ago.

Just think about it for a minute. If you want to go and take in a movie tonight, you surely would not want to go downtown. The beautiful old Paramount Theater became a parking lot 20 years ago and the Hart and the Gordon are both long gone. To see a first-run movie, you will have to go to the new downtown: the Mall of Louisiana. As a matter of fact, for folks in the whole nine-parish region surrounding Baton Rouge, the city’s new downtown is where they come to do the bulk of their shopping.

If you think of Greater Baton Rouge as all those who shop at the Mall of Louisiana, and for whom the corner of I-10 and Bluebonnet is “the business center,” then all of us who live or work in East Baton Rouge Parish - or one of the eight surrounding parishes - are part of the new Downtown Baton Rouge. We’re even bigger than Downtown Zachary and Downtown Central and Downtown Baker combined.

And when you think of it that way, you see that we’re all in this together. And together we’re bigger than we ever thought we were.

Back in the 1950s, Baton Rouge’s fathers hinted broadly that they thought the future of our favorite city was larger than the “small community by the river” where downtown Baton Rouge consisted of stores lining both sides of Third Street. Back then those wise old guys combined the city government of Baton Rouge with the entire government of East Baton Rouge Parish. This move was the catalyst for a future when Baton Rouge would become much more than it was back then - and so it has.

Today Baton Rouge is the population center, or “downtown,” for a million people in nine parishes, and we could all see it if we just remove the blinders from our eyes. Greatness will come for our city when its people embrace this wider world. We just have to open our eyes and see what already exists in order to become much greater than we are.

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