urban bicycle journeys

How much of Baton Rouge LA could I see in three hours by bicycle? Despite all the years I have on and off spent in New Orleans and south Louisiana I had never been to the city Baton Rouge. Never! I have driven through Baton Rouge on I-10 dozens of times but I had never stopped the car. I had never seen the Louisiana State University campus. I had never seen the state Capitol. I had never visited its downtown. I never had had any reason to go there.

Writers and other New Orleans denizens love to poke fun at Baton Rouge. In J.K. Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, the dorky protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly leaves New Orleans only once, to take the bus to Baton Rouge. He never makes that mistake again. As Reilly describes it:

The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.

Baton Rouge is frequently mentioned in popular songs. “Me and Bobby McGee” was written by Kris Kristofferson in 1969 and released posthumously by Janis Joplin in 1971, with its opening line busted flat in Baton Rouge. My version was recorded in our New Orleans apartment.

I drove up to Baton Rouge from New Orleans on a Sunday morning so I could bicycle around. How much could I see by bicycle in a short period of time, with no planning? And oh yeah; the women’s NCAA basketball final game was that afternoon. I wanted to be back home to New Orleans in time to see at least the second half of the second half, so I needed to LEAVE Baton Rouge by about 2:00 PM. That morning in New Orleans it was already 9:30 AM by the time Tootie and I had walked our dog Rosie to Coliseum Square and back. I quickly loaded the Surley bicycle in the back of the Ford Escape Hybrid.

Baton Rouge (population 227,000) is eighty-two miles northwest of New Orleans. The Interstate Highway System works fantastically when it actually works. It only took me an hour and fifteen minutes to drive from my Lower Garden District condo to a Trader Joe’s parking lot on the south side of Baton Rouge near the LSU campus. While I chose this parking lot because it was so close to the I-10 freeway, at 11:00 AM on a Sunday morning things seemed to be happening. The parking lot was almost full. This clearly was the prosperous side of town. There was a Lululemon.

Would they tow my car if I left it here for three hours? There were no signs prohibiting parking. I joke that in Real America parking is seen as a human right. I took the bicycle out and cycled across Perkins Road into a neighborhood called Southdowns. Downtown and the state Capitol building was five miles to the north.

My good friend Cindy had grown up in that neighborhood and she texted me her childhood address. The house was still there. The white picket fence is a newer addition.

Having driven eighty miles across flat swampland from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, my first and biggest impression was topographic. Baton Rouge has hills! New Orleans is unimaginably flat. Most of the rest of south Louisiana also seems built on muck. From Wikipedia: Baton Rouge area owes its historical importance to its strategic site upon the Istrouma Bluff, the first natural bluff upriver on the Mississippi River Delta from the Gulf of Mexico. 

I cycled towards downtown, passing a franklloydwrightesque house sitting on a bluff overlooking University Lake, maybe half a mile from the Mississippi River.

I continued to cycling northward.

Along Highland Road the neighborhood became more commercial and less prosperous.

I passed underneath the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi.

Suddenly I was downtown! Much of it seems to be up on a bluff, with the Mississippi a quarter mile down a steep hill. There is an attractive new library.

Across that square is a fascinating outdoor abstract sculpture, plus the Old State Capitol, an unusual design from 1849 which evokes a medieval castle.

City Hall is delightfully Brutalist.

Just under a mile further north is the big attraction, the current Louisiana State Capitol building. First proposed by just elected governor Huey Long in 1928, the building was built quickly under suspicious financing and opened in 1932, three years before he was assassinated in 1935. . It sits on a huge plot of land on the north side of downtown.

Huey’s statue faced the building. It appears his fans still bring him flowers.

With hardly anyone around I dropped the bicycle and walked up the steps, examining two sculptures by Lorado Taft which in their monumental art deco-ness I find somehow creepy.

This tour of Baton Rouge could only take three hours! I had to continue cycling. The neighborhood changed dramatically immediately adjacent to the Capitol as I cycled through Spanish Town, billed as the oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

I passed through Spanish Town rather quickly before cycling over a bridge crossing I-110. I suddenly was in a poorer formerly industrial area with a couple of abandoned factories. I cycled onward, not really knowing where I was going. There clearly are large sections of urban Baton Rouge that are impoverished. I had seen an area to the south on the map called Garden District, I headed in that direction. Near the point where the vacant industrial land ended and the Garden District began I passed Leola’s Cafe where well dressed people were brunching at noon on a Sunday. I thought about stopping but needed to cover more ground to meet my 2:00 PM departure. I had eaten my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the car driving to Baton Rouge and I was not hungry yet.

I did several up-and-backs through the streets of the Garden District. It is an attractive 1920s-50’s neighborhood, a totally different animal than the Garden District of New Orleans, which contains mostly 1850’s mansions.

I turned further south and cycled near Brooks Park, a city park-like spread that includes a golf course. Nice homes lined one street alongside the course when I suddenly had a flat tire. I would have to stop and do repairs..

I sat on a golf course bench and took my rear wheel off so I could change the tube. I had intended to use my small portable pump. Across the street out of someone’s garage a guy and I presume his wife had been watching me. He walked up and handed me his full size pump. He clearly had bicycled enough to know that having such a pump makes the process smoother. What a nice guy! He just asked that I leave the pump in the garage when I was done.

I found a staple sticking through the tire and put on my spare tube. With the help of such a nice pump I completed the whole process in less than twenty minutes. With the bicycle back together I cycled onward towards the Southdowns neighborhood where I had started, passing this interesting cocktail bar with a great neon sign.

I was just after 1:00 PM and I was only about a mile from my car. I stumbled onto Overpass Merchant which sits at the point where Perkins Road passes under I-10. It was packed with customers; a good sign. People were waiting for a table but I snagged a seat at the bar next to a woman who was likely an LSU graduate student. She worked on a complex looking academic paper the whole time she ate,

Overpass Merchant seemed quite the scene.

I have railed about how restaurants in America serve insanely large portions. I have said that they do this because they can rationalize higher prices because the portions are so huge. I have mentally wished that they would stop giving us so much food even if it was at the same price. Be careful what you wish for. Why did I feel mildly snubbed when the thirteen dollar plus tax and tip avocado toast with one egg was so small, even if it was the perfect satiating amount? With a six dollar screwdriver it was, of course, delicious.

It was 1:40 PM when I left Overpass Merchant. My car was a mile and a half away down Perkins Road in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. I biked up to the store.

I think about grocery stores way too much and have a complex mental relationship with Trader Joe’s. In my alt universe in Chapel Hill NC our friends rave about TJ, especially certain prepared foods. The TJ in Chapel Hill is too far away from where I live; all the way down the hill that gives Chapel Hill its name. I would have to cycle groceries up that hill or even worse, I would have to drive there in my car. Almost nine hundred miles away in New Orleans it is a surprisingly similar situation. The only TJ is in Metairie. Even I think cycling all the way to Metairie to buy groceries is ridiculous. I would have to drive there in my car. Here in Baton Rouge I had been absolved. I was already here. Why not do some shopping? I do not buy many prepared foods anyway, but I snagged three bottles of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc at only $6.99 each. I should have bought a case. Bulk stuff like three pound bags of jasmine brown rice and one pound bags of raw almonds are close to half the price I pay at regular grocery stores. I got a large bottle of olive oil with a handy pour spout. I piled everything in the car and drove an hour and fifteen minutes back to New Orleans where Tootie and I watched the second half of the second half of the basketball game. The LSU women had lost the previous day but the basketball final of Iowa and South Carolina was indeed exciting.

I reflected on my three hours in Baton Rouge. Was it as terrible as Ignatius J. Reilly thought? I did not even visit the LSU campus. Baton Rouge looks like other Southern cities doing well in our current economy. It has the state government and a major university. Parts of Baton Rouge looked a lot like Tootie’s hometown of Winston-Salem NC; blandly Southern American. I saw very little of the exoticism of New Orleans. Compared to Baton Rouge New Orleans feels like another planet.