Bay St. Louis — Old Town Galleries, a Working Bay, and a Storm History That Shaped Every Street

What Bay St. Louis Actually Is

Bay St. Louis is Hancock County's seat and one of the older towns on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, platted along the bluffs above St. Louis Bay where the Jourdan and Wolf Rivers empty into the Gulf. Its Old Town Historic District -- centered on Main Street, Second Street, and Beach Boulevard -- is the town's defining physical asset: raised cottages and Victorian-era homes, many painted in the bright, individual colors the town has become known for, sitting a few blocks from a genuinely walkable downtown of independent restaurants, boutiques, and roughly a dozen working art galleries and studios. The L&N Train Depot, a Mission-style building dating to around 1928 and now a designated Mississippi Landmark, anchors the district's north end and today houses the city's tourism office alongside the Bay St. Louis Mardi Gras Museum and the Alice Moseley Folk Art Museum -- a real, still-functioning piece of the town's railroad-era commercial history, not a recreated prop.

The town's identity as an arts colony predates Katrina by decades -- folk artist Alice Moseley and painter Jerry Dixon are both cited as having helped establish Bay St. Louis as a working artists' community going back to the 1970s and 1980s, and it had a documented reputation as a weekend retreat for New Orleanians well before 2005. What Katrina did was force a genuine test of that identity: after the storm scattered residents and destroyed a large share of the town's housing stock, the local arts community organized to keep working -- reaching out to galleries as far away as New York and Los Angeles to keep showing and selling work, drawing on National Endowment for the Arts and artist-to-artist support to survive the immediate aftermath, and eventually helping the town regain and even expand its pre-storm identity as a creative destination. The Second Saturday Artwalk, run by the Old Town Merchants Association and now in its fourth decade, is the clearest present-day evidence that identity is real and ongoing rather than a marketing description: on the second Saturday of every month, Old Town's galleries, shops, and restaurants stay open late with live music and featured artists, drawing both locals and day-trippers from New Orleans and the wider Gulf Coast.

That rebuild has not been cost-free or evenly distributed. Regional 20th-anniversary Katrina coverage in 2025 explicitly contrasted Bay St. Louis' relatively strong recovery with the much slower rebuild of nearby Pearlington and other unincorporated Hancock County communities, and separate reporting has described Bay St. Louis becoming "the place to be" after Katrina specifically for buyers who can afford the town's post-storm, more upscale rebuild -- a real signal that the town's arts-and-tourism-driven revival has come with meaningfully higher property values than the working-class fishing and shipping town Bay St. Louis was before 2005. A buyer evaluating Bay St. Louis today is evaluating a genuinely two-sided story: an authentic, still-thriving creative community built on top of one of the most direct hurricane hits any American coastal town has taken twice in the past 60 years.

Beyond Old Town, Bay St. Louis' other major anchors are recreational and civic rather than purely artistic: Hollywood Casino Gulf Coast sits on Beach Boulevard with an on-site marina and golf access at neighboring Diamondhead, and Buccaneer State Park -- just across the line in Waveland but functionally part of the same beach corridor -- runs the Buccaneer Bay water park alongside its campground. The town is served by two separate public school systems, the Bay St. Louis-Waveland School District (about 1,700 students across 4 schools) and, for some outlying areas, the countywide Hancock County School District, plus Saint Stanislaus College, a well-known private Catholic boys' school founded in 1854 that itself sustained major storm damage in Katrina and Camille alike and rebuilt after both.

Arts, Dining & Things to Do

Second Saturday Artwalk is Bay St. Louis' signature recurring event -- Old Town Merchants Association member galleries, shops, and restaurants stay open with live music and rotating featured artists from roughly 4 to 7 p.m. on the second Saturday of every month, a tradition regional coverage describes as running more than three decades. Gallery 220 and Bay Books are among the frequently cited Old Town anchors, alongside a rotating set of working studios; 100 Men Hall, a historic African American social hall on the Mississippi Blues Trail, adds a real, distinct cultural landmark to the district beyond the visual-arts scene. For food, Mockingbird Cafe -- named for the Harper Lee novel -- is a longtime Old Town breakfast-and-brunch fixture in a historic building, and the district's restaurant mix runs from casual seafood and po-boys to more polished sit-down dining, with reviewers consistently citing Bay St. Louis as a legitimate food destination relative to its size.

Outside Old Town, Hollywood Casino Gulf Coast on Beach Boulevard combines a roughly 1,000-slot casino floor, a marina, golf access at nearby Diamondhead Country Club, and multiple on-site restaurants; Buccaneer State Park, just over the city line in Waveland, runs Buccaneer Bay -- a 460,000-gallon wave pool and water park with multiple slides -- alongside camping and RV sites, making the Bay St. Louis-Waveland corridor a genuine family-recreation draw beyond its arts identity. Bay St. Louis' own beach runs along Beach Boulevard within walking distance of Old Town, giving the town a rare combination for this stretch of coast: a walkable historic arts district, a working beach, and a casino-anchored recreation corridor all within a few miles of each other.