The Downtown Development Corporation is hosting a discussion of the South Fourth Street Retail Merchandising Plan on Monday, August 29 at 6:00 p.m. at the Seelbach Hotel (500 South Fourth Street). Rick Hill, author of the plan and president of Village Solutions, will detail what’s in the report. You may recall Village Solutions for their planning efforts along East Market Street, which featured equally flashy renderings as that up above.
Founder and Editor at Broken Sidewalk
Branden founded Broken Sidewalk in 2008 while practicing architecture in Louisville. He continued the site for seven years while living in New York City, returning to Louisville in 2016. Branden is a graduate of the College of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, and has covered architecture, design, and urbanism for The Architect's Newspaper, Designers & Books, Inhabitat, and the American Institute of Architects.
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You know what would be awesome? If the facade of the old Ohio theatre was incorporated into a new movie house, occupying the space currently taken up by the parking garage behind it. All that retail space along 4th street could start catering to movie goers on Friday and Saturday night. Thought provoking, no?
My goodness, look at all those people! Where on earth will they all park?
🙂
@Porter Stevens – aye Porter, you make a good point…but that would require logic and vision, something our fair city has little of…
@Eric – Easy… get Todd Blue to tear down a few of those unsightly, old buildings, and voila… surface parking!
Wow – those huge lights are coming straight from Safier! God, I hope it’s a hummus party.
Yawn…believe it when I see it, show me the money, etc.
It’d be fabulous to have good retail here on 4th but the city first needs to get rid of the ‘gotta quarter’ guys and the vagrants/loiterers/drug dealers?/urinators who hang around Guthrie EVERY day.
@Nancy – Nancy, while it may seem as tho the marginalized people you mention are impeding the development of retail downtown one only has to look at other cities across North America to know that retail can flourish despite their presence. I would argue that the lack of retail downtown has more to do with the lack of housing options, especially those for middle and upper-middle class people. The people that you mention might be a perceived barrier to these classes moving to the downtown area but downtown space not only ought to be open to everyone but should not become a mirror image of sterile suburban communities where people are excluded based on financial resources.
oh gee lookie, Fourth Street in the early 1960’s, when it took two hours to cruise two blocks on a friday night, and before all those “improvements” ……like paving it for a pedestrian mall (1969),closing it for a Mallaria (1980), opening it wink wink for Fourth St Cavernousbarsnoretail……..somehow wishing may not make this so. Pretty renderings, but no plan created Market Street, those ratty old buildings just kept reinventing themselves, all by themselves. Now, if we could just keep Toad Blue-evil out of it………………and folks who want to delete street people …. !
@Porter Stevens – That is a cool idea but, as a smoker who formerly worked downtown, I really appreciated having Shorty’s Smoke Shop so close to my office. The men that work there are super friendly, sell their goods at reasonable prices. have a decent selection, and humored me when I attempted to speak Arabic. I’m glad they found a good use for the space.
What about City center stust?
For anyone interested in reading more.
http://www.downtowndevelopmentcorp.org/Portals/83/2011_LDDC_Report.pdf