Be sure to stop by the Old 502 Winery at 120 South 10th Street on Thursday, March 26 for what is shaping up to be the top urbanism event so far in 2015. The Louisville chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and City Collaborative are hosting the Future Urban Spaces Meetup from 6:00 to 8:00p.m. and will discuss one of the most challenging issues facing Louisville today: the Ninth Street Divide.
According to the organizers:
We’re looking for makers & shakers of all kinds. Interactive designers, landscape designers, experience designers, light designers, urban planners, data geeks, architects, sculptors, metalworkers, woodworkers, gamers, electrical engineers, structural engineers…ALL OF YA.
If you are creative & have cool ideas, come take a walk with us & come up with ideas to help bridge the gap between West Main Street and Portland. Pie in the sky…what would your expertise add to a project?
We’ll start by going over the city’s future plans and talk about goals, obstacles and frustrations from local business owners and residents.
Then we’ll take a walk & we’ll talk about those same things from your perspective & finally collect ideas on what we could do collectively to address what we come up with.
Because of limited space, it’s recommended that you RSVP on the event’s Meetup page. You can also stay up to date on the event’s Facebook page. Drone photography of the area will be provided by the Overhead Group to better study the area. The event’s gorgeous poster was designed by J. Jonny Shaw. This event shouldn’t be missed!
An update: unfortunately the drones were called off because of weather delays. We may call them in later but won’t have that piece for next week.
This is a little confusing: The IXDA publicity says the event is about, not the Ninth St. Divide at all, but “the gap between West Main Street and Portland.” Yet since West Market is generally considered to be the southern boundary of Portland, West Main is already well within Portland; there is no such gap.
I wonder what the event is really about?
Since it is a walkabout in the vicinity of the Old 502 Winery at 120 S. 10th St., perhaps it is about the “Fourteenth St. Divide”? The railroad tracks that run where there would otherwise be a 14th St. form a pretty severe neighborhood boundary. I daresay most Portlanders would mark the east end of Portland at 15th St. rather than Ninth or Tenth Sts.
OMG! I sure hope the organizers of this event don’t think West Main Street ends in the 800 block (…but that would be funny).
I can understand how the choice of words was confusing. Let me see if I can help clarify. There is a mess of ramps at Main and 9th and a big scary piece of dark overpass for pedestrians to navigate under. This is often considered the “gap” or “divide” between the parts of town and often where people abandon their walks from downtown. This effects the growth of what lies beyond that. Collectively, as a community of awesome creatives, we’re going to look at that area and brainstorm what could be done to get people from point A to point B and vice versa. What might be the thing that draws them and what can be done to get them there safely? The city has ideas, the businesses and residents have ideas, we want to hear yours now. I hope that helps. Here’s a map link: 878 W Main St
http://goo.gl/maps/mDq8g
These Ninth Street divide references were discussed in the “Move Louisville” series of presentations –and included two projects that appear to be adopted by KIPDA and planned for funding
Concrete suppliers dream ! $ 50 million in concrete and steel expressway
EX-001 EX Expressway Access Modification 9th Street Expressway Removal
Remove 9th Street expressway interchange. 9th Street will
no longer directly access I-64. Access may be relocated to
12th-13th Streets (EX-002).
Move Louisville Workshops $ 30,000,000.00
EX-002 EX Expressway Access Modification 12th-13th Street Interchange
Construct a new interchange at 12th-13th Streets to replace
downtown access via 9th Street Interchange (removed in EX-
001).
Move Louisville Workshops $ 20,000,000.00
So whatever our ideas are they should probably include demolishing some buildings in these project
foot prints and spending $ 50 million on new expressway ramps instead $ 50 million on a market street streetcar or some other no emissions transit project. (like funding TARC drivers for zero busses).
So the big scary overpass looks destined to be moved over to 12th-13th. If they want to plan better
urban connectivity-walkability they will be able to do it at the 12th street interchange and the 9th street
ramp will disappear. Thats $ 50 million of your money KIPDA is spending for this.
High volume highways create a penumbra of toxic ultrafine particulate includiing combustion carcinogens
that pack the air with 10 nanometer particulates. Concentrations are 10 times background levels close to
the highways.
“While there are no US regulations for PM0.1 (“ultrafine particles”, UFP; diameter less than 0.1
μm), recent research raises the concern that these particles may be especially toxic (1, 2). UFP can
penetrate deeply into the lung and can cross the lung lining (3, 4), which is ~ 0.1-20 μm thick. Vehicles and other combustion sources are important contributors to urban UFP. UFP concentrations (particle number per volume of air) can be an order of magnitude higher on freeways than in background urban air.”
Real time prediction of size resolved ultrafine PM on freeways, Srijan Aggarwal, Ricky Jain, and Julian D Marshall, Environ. Sci. & Technol., Publication Date (Web): 20 Dec 2011.
Big scary overpasses?! So what, exactly, are we duplicating at Preston and East Cavernous maws of concrete?! The very same thing .
Moving it as noted above is merely destroying yet more urban infrastructure for Merceresque voids of epic proportion. Not to mention the vast disruption created by yet another poorly thought out transportation fiasco .
Like Ninth Street. Born in the sixties dead before inception but they built it anyway. Louisville’s own still born plan……..