Spanish Town

Spanish Town now means flamingos. The first Mardi Gras parade here, in 1981, was a few children on foot; today it is the city's largest, held the Saturday before Mardi Gras, and a pink flamingo is its unofficial mascot, under a motto that poor taste beats no taste. After the Civil War, freed African Americans seeking work became the neighborhood's main population. The Pino House of 1823 is the oldest building. The district, 49.4 acres with 258 contributing properties, joined the National Register on August 31, 1978.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Capitol Park Museum — steps away
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — steps away
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• Old State Capitol — 0.6 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.1 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Zachary Taylor — steps away
• Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March — steps away
• Pentagon Barracks — steps away
• Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862 — steps away