St. Joseph Cathedral

The red pole that named this city stood miles upriver, marking the boundary between Houma and Bayagoula hunting grounds when French explorers passed in 1699. A century and a half later, when Baton Rouge became Louisiana's capital in 1849, Catholics put a church on this Main Street corner in 1853—the mother church of what would become the Diocese of Baton Rouge, one of the oldest continuously operating Catholic parishes in the state. The structure you see now is Gothic Revival, built after the earlier church took damage during the Civil War. The spires rise two blocks from the Old State Capitol, another building that bore the war and was rebuilt. The cathedral is open for Mass and visiting; the façade reads best from Main Street, where the proportions and the stonework make clear what kind of permanence was intended here.