It’s happened again. Another commercial building on West Market Street in the Russell neighborhood hits the dust. I first began to worry about this building, most recently the Portland Bait & Tackle Shop slash A1 Batteries & Tires, back in 2008 after an attached townhouse was demolished leaving a hole in the side of the building.
The structure was crudely boarded up then and in disrepair but signs on the exterior indicated that the building was still salvageable. In December, I stopped by the structure again when visiting the demolition site of a brick mansion on the next block and noticed the city had declared the property an emergency demolition candidate. The boards over the windows, which were never fastened well, were gone and the hole in the side of the building was larger (although it looked like humans were making it bigger, not gravity).
A few days later, a tipster wrote in to say the building had been leveled. I stopped by one last time before my flight out of Louisville to document the rubble. This building might not have been ornate, but its vernacular character certainly contributed to what’s left of West Market Street. One by one, West Market Street is being undone.
