Capitol Park Museum - Louisiana State Museum

Not a bad museum. However, the museum suffers greatly from poor exhibit maintenance. (The elevator was also out of order.) The museum has an excellent "interactive music exhibits" area where you can "hear the distinctive southwest Louisiana sounds of Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop, [and] Baton Rouge blues," which has five separate listening areas, of which four were completely out of order on 9/10/2015. The one that worked was very nice, but I really missed not getting to experience the rest of the music at the other four due either to the laziness, sloth, and negligence of the museum's directors, or to lack of funds. This museum is hardly the only one in the US that suffers from extremely poor exhibit maintenance, but that's no excuse. If the problem is a money problem, and the money required to maintain the place properly wasn't there at the outset, they should never have built the museum in the first place. They should either maintain their exhibits properly or shut the place down. Another very serious problem in the museum is lack of places to sit down. There ought to be at least 20 more such places than there are. The museum is very hard on the over-45 crowd or on people who find standing very uncomfortable (like myself). Because they have film clips longer than one minute around--and they have a lot of them--they need to put benches there so that the average person over 45 can watch them without suffering from leg pain, foot pain, and back pain due to having to stand through the whole thing. Overall, I found the museum extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes it is claimed by museums that the law prohibits benches in a lot of areas due to the need for wheelchair access. However, wheelchair access would not in any way be impeded by the construction of benches. In any event, if there really was an issue with wheelchair access then obviously the architects or curators who designed these museums and exhibits made a serious blunder in designing them in such a manner as not to allow both wheelchair access and benches.