Union Street sits two blocks off Beach Boulevard, behind the old train depot, easy to miss unless you already know what's back there. Most Labor Day weekends, the crowd gathering outside a clapboard building painted three shades of blue isn't from Bay St. Louis at all. They drove in from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, sometimes farther, because they know something a lot of residents still treat as a footnote on their own calendar: the biggest three-day music festival on this stretch of coast happens four blocks from their front door, and it isn't Cruisin' the Coast.
This year it's September 4 through 6. The building is 100 Men Hall, and the festival is Booker Fest, now in its seventh year. If your plan for that weekend starts and ends with a cooler and the beach, you're skipping the one event that actually tells you something true about this town: how much cultural weight Bay St. Louis carries when it isn't performing for tourists, and how little most residents realize it.
A Building the State Almost Bulldozed
The Hall was built in 1922 by twelve African American men who'd founded the Hundred Members' Debating Benevolent Association in 1894, a mutual aid society that helped members through sickness and buried their dead with dignity in a town that offered them few other institutions of their own. For three generations it doubled as an entertainment hall, and the entertainment wasn't local church socials. Residents who grew up here recall Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Fats Domino on that stage, a stop on the same Chitlin' Circuit that carried Black musicians across the segregated South when almost no venue north or south of here would book them.
Hurricane Katrina nearly ended that story. The building sat damaged and empty long enough that FEMA was preparing to raze it before Jesse Loya and Kerrie White bought it in 2006, restored it with a $110,000 state grant, and reopened it as a venue in 2011, the same year it earned a Mississippi Blues Trail marker. It closed again in 2014. In 2018, Rachel Dangermond bought the property, intending mostly to use it for writing workshops, and instead spent the years since restoring its floors, commissioning murals from artists including Adrienne Brown David and Darrin Butler, and building out a "Tin Shed" behind the main hall for artist residencies. In 2024 the state gave the Hall its Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and it's now recognized as the only endowed African American landmark in Mississippi.
Dangermond has said the quiet part out loud more than once:
"I think a lot of people, even here in Bay St. Louis, don't understand how significant this place is."
That's the gap this post is pointing at. Second Saturday, the monthly art walk that most residents already treat as their cultural anchor, is real and it's good. Merchants from Downtown to Depot Row stay open late, live music runs through the historic district, and the Old Town Merchants Association has built a genuine local ritual out of it. But Second Saturday is the rehearsal. It happens twelve times a year and asks little of the town beyond keeping its doors open past five. Booker Fest happens once, and it asks Bay St. Louis to hold up a piece of history most other Gulf Coast towns don't have and couldn't replicate if they tried.
What's Actually on the Stage This Year
James Carroll Booker III, the pianist the festival is named for, was born in New Orleans in 1939 and raised in Bay St. Louis by his aunt, Bessie Lizana. He learned piano here, attended St. Rose de Lima, and went on to mentor Dr. John and Harry Connick Jr. before his death in 1983. The festival built in his honor is, by the Hall's own description, the coast's only three-day fest with acts running continuously across the weekend, which is a specific enough claim that it's worth checking your assumptions if you've never actually gone.
Here's what's confirmed for this year:
| Day | Time | Performer |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, Sept. 4 | 6:00 PM | Chris Vincent & The Raw Deals |
| Saturday, Sept. 5 | 2:00 PM | St. Rose de Lima Gospel Choir |
| Saturday, Sept. 5 | 3:30 PM | Maggie Koerner |
| All weekend | Rotating sets | The Rumble, Water Seed, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Joe Krown Trio +1 featuring Papa Mali |
A full weekend Hall Pass runs $110 and gets you into every set across all three days. The St. Rose de Lima Gospel Choir slot is worth building your schedule around if you can only make one thing. Several of its current members sang in that same choir when Booker himself played there as a boy, which means the Saturday afternoon set isn't a tribute act. It's the same institution, still doing what it's always done, on the same ground.
Eating Before the Music, Two Minutes Off the Interstate
If you're coming from anywhere west of downtown, there's a reason to route yourself past Highway 603 first. Boonies on the Bayou opened this year in a building raised on cypress pillars over the water, a relocation from a barbecue pop-up the owners had been running at Trackside Bar in Pearl River, Louisiana, before that bar stopped allowing children and the family-friendly barbecue operation needed a new home. They found one at 10408 Highway 603, about two minutes off I-10, and built a full menu around it: smoked brisket and burnt ends, house-made pastas, fried pickles, and a rotating seafood list that leans on charbroiled oysters and a smoked mullet dip built specifically for this stretch of coast. It's open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., with a Sunday brunch service from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
That a Louisiana pop-up chose Bay St. Louis for its permanent address, rather than staying closer to New Orleans, says something about where the coast's food money is actually moving. It's a small data point, but it's a real one, and it's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a portal listing or a median-price chart. It shows up because someone was paying attention to what's opening on Highway 603 this year, not just what's listed on Beach Boulevard.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
The easy read on Bay St. Louis is that its cultural identity runs entirely through Old Town, the antique shops on Main Street, and the Second Saturday crowd that fills the sidewalks between Downtown and the Depot District. That's not wrong. It's just incomplete. The town's deepest cultural asset sits a few blocks off that same strip, in a building most tourism guides mention in passing and most residents drive past without a second look most months of the year.
Labor Day weekend is the one stretch when that asset gets tested in public, when out-of-town visitors who've heard of James Booker and the Chitlin' Circuit show up expecting Bay St. Louis to deliver something real, and it does. The residents who skip it because it reads as a tourist event are underselling the same town they'd tell a friend to move to. If you want to understand what makes this place different from Gulfport or Ocean Springs or any other Gulf Coast town competing for the same visitors and the same new residents, four blocks of Union Street on the first weekend of September will teach you more than a season of Second Saturdays ever could.
That kind of texture, the history behind a building, the reason a barbecue joint picked this exit off I-10 over another, is also the kind of thing worth knowing if you're ever the one fielding questions about what makes a neighborhood here worth the drive. If you're weighing a move to Bay St. Louis, or you already live here and you're thinking about what's next, Tracey Ross knows this coast block by block. Let's Connect.
