The orchestra pit is dug and poured and is ready for performing arts students and professional performers at its future site in the Shaw Center for the Arts.
The arts center is one of several projects going on in the downtown area attempting to draw not only University students and local Baton Rouge residents downtown, but also tourists visiting the many sites of Baton Rouge, said Davis Rhorer, executive director of the Downtown Development District.
The center will open in fall 2004 and will house a variety of different art activities, Rhorer said.
There will be classroom space for middle school, high school and University students and gallery space for private artists or restaurants, he said.
“This is a tremendous injection of arts not only downtown but in the regional area,” Rhorer said.
The entire block will accommodate the center, incorporating the park across the street with the design of the building and the outdoor plaza, he said.
The center will serve as an arts “incubator” designed to help sustain artists and by building a stronger business basis for them, said Genny Thomas, executive director of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge.
The educational component of the center will act as an after-school program similar to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, but more open to any middle school or high school student interested in the arts, Thomas said.
University students in the art school also will have night classes at the Shaw Center, and the LSU Museum of Art will be moved to the new complex, she said.
There also will be theaters able to incorporate foreign films and Black Box theater performances, which the arts council will oversee, Thomas said.
The center is a $50 million project partnership between the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the LSU School of Art, the LSU Museum of Art, the state of Louisiana and the city of Baton Rouge — both providing funding, land and physical spaces, she said.
      “This will be such a wonderful project,” Thomas said. “Things will be happening 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.”
Brad Cason, who has been working with Bernhard Mechanical Contractors, Inc. for 22 years, said the weather has slowed the construction of the center, but he expects it to be finished in Fall 2004 as projected.
Making basements and orchestra pits in Baton Rouge with the river a block away is “terrible here,” Cason said.
The construction team has had to use French drains in the basements that constantly pump water out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, he said.
“It’s supposed to be fine and fru-fru,” Cason said.
The structure of the center will be built around the circa 1930s Auto Hotel already on the site — formerly a brick parking garage — to house a gift shop and offices, he said.
The old three-story garage will remain, and a seven-story complex will tower behind it with a landscape view of the city and river, he said.
Right around the corner from the future sight of the Shaw Center for the Arts and across from the old state capitol is the Irene W. Pennington Planetarium and ExxonMobil Space Theater.
The planetarium has been under construction since February 2001 and will be opening May 24, said Kendra Kimmons, public relations director for the Louisiana Art and Science Museum.
Inside the 5,000-square-foot complex located on River Road across from the Centroplex are nine solar system planet models built to scale where the rings around Saturn are 15 feet wide and Earth is the size of a bowling ball, she said.
Many exhibits and shows will begin as soon as the building opens, attracting students and tourists, Kimmons said.
Admissions into the planetarium for adults is $5 to $16 and between $5 and $13 for children.
Another educational project taking place downtown is across the street from the new state capitol.
The Louisiana Arts and Sciences Center has been under construction since March 11, 2002 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year, said Curt Nissen, project superintendent of Carothers Construction, Inc.
The construction also has been slowed down by the weather, but he is confident in finishing the project on time.
The center will be the site of a new history museum, also designed to draw people downtown.