Baton Rouge is Louisiana's state capital and second-largest city, sitting on the east bank of the Mississippi River about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans. It's a working city — the River Road chemical plants and oil refineries that line the Mississippi here are the industrial backbone of Louisiana's economy — but it has a distinct character, especially around the LSU campus and the old downtown.
The city has two capitol buildings. The New State Capitol, completed in 1932 under Governor Huey Long, is a 34-storey Art Deco tower — the tallest state capitol building in the US — with an observation deck and a hall of outsized governor portraits inside. Huey Long was assassinated in the building in 1935; the bullet holes are still visible in the marble. The Old State Capitol, a neo-Gothic castle on the bluff above the river, was once called a "mortified carbuncle" by Mark Twain; now restored, it houses a museum of Louisiana political history. Nearby, the Old Louisiana Governor's Mansion — deliberately built to resemble the White House — is open for tours, and the Pentagon Barracks predate the more famous building in Virginia by over a century.
Louisiana State University (LSU) is one of the South's major universities, with a sprawling campus and a football culture that dominates autumn weekends in the city. Tiger Stadium — known as Death Valley — holds over 102,000 people on game nights. The LSU Campus Mounds are 11,000-year-old earthworks sitting quietly between the campus lakes, among the oldest human constructions in the Americas. South of campus, Magnolia Mound Plantation and the LSU Rural Life Museum give a grounded picture of Louisiana's plantation-era past.
On the riverfront, the destroyer USS Kidd is moored as a museum ship, and the Capitol Park Museum covers Louisiana history through a replica flatboat, Mardi Gras floats, and an offshore oil exhibit. The Shaw Center for the Arts anchors the downtown arts district. The surrounding streets have the best concentration of bars and restaurants in Baton Rouge, particularly in the Spanish Town and Beauregard Town neighbourhoods.