Live music pours from the stage of the 325-seat Manship Theatre. Next door in the Hartley/Vey Studio Theatre, a zany improv troupe sparks laughter. On the fifth floor, American and European paintings and sculptures draw visitors to the LSU Museum of Art, the city’s only dedicated art museum. And high atop the sixth floor, diners savor sushi, craft cocktails and a peerless view of the Mississippi River from the terrace of the Japanese restaurant, Tsunami.
Whatever brings visitors to the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge, there’s little question the facility is one of the Capital Region’s greatest successes. The $60 million project, pulled off by a cross-section of community partners who thought big and eschewed bureaucracy, celebrates its 20th anniversary in March.
A hive of cultural activity and home to spectacular vistas, the 125,000-square-foot, multiuse arts center is the crowning jewel of Plan Baton Rouge, the 1998 master plan that successfully pulled then-declining downtown back from the brink. Since 2010 alone, $1.7 billion has been invested in the Capital City’s urban core in the form of new hotels, bars, restaurants and residential development. It’s not a stretch to say the Shaw Center lit the spark.
Photo by Jordan Hefler. Courtesy Shaw Center for the Arts.
“The Shaw Center was basically the first step in Plan Baton Rouge to try to recapture downtown and revitalize it,” recalls John Davies, former president and CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation
Davies says the project was a chance to show both affluent donors and everyday residents who had given up on downtown a glimpse of what was possible: thriving theaters and museums; state-of-the-art offices and residential developments; rooftop restaurants and architectural style worthy of national awards.
History in the making
The Shaw Center’s history is linked to that of its storied, gone-to-seed predecessor, the Auto Hotel. The 1922 state-owned structure had been a parking garage used by hotel guests. But by the time Plan Baton Rouge rolled around, it was a well-established eyesore, recalls Mark Drennen, who then served as Louisiana’s commissioner of administration.
“During one of the downtown planning sessions, I said, ‘On behalf of the state, we have this old Auto Hotel that is abandoned,’” Drennen recalls. “‘I would like everybody to think about and advise the state on what we should do with that building.’”
Despite its broken windows and decrepit vibes, the Auto Hotel had charmed Miami-based planner Andrés Duany, whose firm DPZ CoDesign was hired to create the downtown master plan. Drennen and his staff had built a platform enabling visitors to experience the dramatic river views from atop the building. Duany was wowed. He would also publicly suggest the building be converted into a “mini Guggenheim,” a Louisiana-fied riff on the Manhattan museum. The Auto Hotel’s interior spiral ramp could lead visitors from gallery to gallery, just like the Guggenheim, Duany had mused.
That didn’t happen. The hotel’s condition was too far gone to renovate. But the genie was out of the bottle. Momentum surged to build a splashy arts center in its place.
A partnership bloomed between the state and BRAF, both of which chipped in to fund the project.
The partners hired Boston-based Schwartz/Silver Architects to design the massive complex, drawn to occupy most of the block between North Boulevard and Convention Street, and Lafayette and Third streets. The Auto Hotel was mostly razed to make way, but its preserved western and northern walls were incorporated into the site.
Some of the other pieces fell into place thanks to timing, says BRAF past president Jennifer Eplett Reilly.
The Shaw Center’s LSU Museum of Art debuted “Andy Warhol / Friends & Frenemies: Prints from the Cochran Collection” in 2024. Photo by Charles ChampagneManship Theatre welcomes musical acts, screenings and more all year. Photo by Jordan Hefler. Courtesy Manship Theatre.
Concurrent to the Shaw Center’s development, LSU was looking for a permanent home for the LSU Museum of Art, then located in a small room in Memorial Tower. The university had been considering moving LSU MOA to Burden Museum and Gardens, but Eplett Reilly worked with then-LSU Chancellor Mark Emmert to incorporate it within the Shaw Center.
The Shaw Center’s working committee also envisioned a theater for live music, and its members reached out to experts for advice on format. While there’s been debate on if the number of seats was too low, its superb acoustics and stage views have made it a leading place to see a show.
The team also thought adding a rooftop restaurant would be a draw.
“Some people talked about getting a nice restaurant from New Orleans,” Drennen says. “I remember I suggested we go to Lafayette and bring Tsunami in.”
‘Why not?’
The leaders who drove its completion say the Shaw Center’s creation was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for Baton Rouge.
“I think it was a combination of imagination, some real strategic thinking and a splash of serendipity,” Eplett Reilly says. “It was truly an extraordinary public-private partnership.”
While the project gave Baton Rouge an exciting, on-trend venue to experience the arts, it also showed a new way of getting things done.
The Shaw Center was the first public-private partnership of its kind in the state, recalls lawyer and developer Charles Landry, who structured its arrangement.
“We were trying to figure out how to do something which, at that time, had not been done before,” Landry recalls. “And we certainly ran into enough headwinds from folks who said to us, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Our response was, ‘Why not?’”
The Shaw Center served as a template for subsequent public-private real estate ventures, including the $70 million transformation of the derelict Heidelberg Hotel across the street into the Hilton Capitol Center in 2006.
Photo by Jordan Hefler. Courtesy Shaw Center for the Arts.
It also brought a new sense of magic to downtown thanks to its varied components, which create the opportunity for layered experiences. Hang out at a coffee shop one day. See a new arts exhibit the next. Or simply head to one of the overlooks to gaze at the Mighty Mississippi. Drennen says creating public access on the sixth floor was one of his top priorities.
“I made one requirement that the rooftop be open to the public,” Drennen says. “And that it could not become a private space, that everybody in the community would be able to go up to the rooftop and enjoy the view.”
Eplett Reilly says the Shaw Center has served as a cultural hub.
“It was the first meeting place for people from across the region to come and explore that which makes us most human—the arts,” she says. “I really do think it adds to our experience of culture and possibility.”
This article was originally published in the January 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.
