Creation Gardens Plans East Market Expansion

Sep 25, 2009

Concept of Creation Gardens project on the Service Welding Block (rendering courtesy Village Solutions)

[ Editor’s Note: To avoid confusion, I replaced the full block concept plan with a zoomed in version of the Creation Gardens’ site. This rendering does not portray what Creation Gardens will build, just a vision for incorporating the facility on the site and how the block can be redeveloped putting the pedestrian first. You can see the full rendering of the Service Welding block after the click. ]

Faced with the uncertain future of its current location in the path of the planned Spaghetti Junction expansion and looking for room to expand, Creation Gardens, a local distributor of wholesale produce and gourmet foods, plans to relocate its facilities into the heart of the East Market Street – Nulu corridor.

Site of Creation Gardens'' Expansion (BS File Photo) — Site of Creation Gardens’ expansion on East Market and Shelby streets. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)

Creation Gardens owners Ron and Mollie Turnier have placed three parcels on East Market between Clay and Shelby Streets under contract and plan to build a state-of-the-art retail and commercial distribution center on the corner of Market and Shelby Streets. The land is currently occupied by the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home and a gravel lot used to store tanks for the adjacent Service Tanks business which will to continue to operate at its current location.

Plans call for a new 27,000 square foot facility that will offer fresh produce, gourmet food products, baked goods, meats, seafood, and chicken. The market will be open to wholesale buyers and the general public. About 17,000 square feet will house a “fresh-to-the-chef” distribution center and the remaining 10,000 square feet will contain a market open to the public. Also planned is a chef member’s lounge and resource library and a new restaurant could also be located at the facility.

East Market Street site circa 1980 (via NRHP / NPS) — East Market Street site circa 1980. (via NRHP / NPS)

The site of Creation Gardens’ expansion was once a food market years ago. First Link Supermarket, now located on East Liberty Street at Jackson Street, once operated a grocery store on the corner. Now, the corner and surrounding region are gaining a reputation as a food hot-spot in Louisville again. Besides the Creation Gardens announcement, Gill Holland and a group of investors plan a public market across the street stretching to Jefferson Street and a restaurant row is already well established.

Ron Turnier tells us that he hopes to create a “forward looking” building that respects the neighborhood’s existing cityscape. He has brought K. Norman Berry Architects of West Main Street to assist with the design. Turnier says he’s been meeting with the architects frequently to work out the final design challenges such as loading dock access to the facility. Creation Gardens will have a booth at this weekend’s Nulu East Market Festival to share his ideas with the public and display new renderings of the facility.

Concept plan of how the Service Tanks block could one day be redeveloped (courtesy Village Solutions) — Concept plan of how the Service Tanks block could one day be redeveloped. (Courtesy Village Solutions)

Creation Gardens is working with Village Solutions, a real estate consulting firm based in Anchorage, to help with the success of the project. President of Village Solutions Rick Hill says he has worked with Service Welding and Machine Company owners Carl and Earl Grier to develop a concept plan demonstrating how their entire site, nearly three-quarters of the block, could one day be redeveloped. (See Village Solutions’ rendering above and full rendering after the click.)

Rick Hill explains that while Service Tanks will continue to operate at its current site for now, someday the property will be redeveloped into a thriving pedestrian environment. The rendering isn’t meant to suggest what will eventually be built, but is “a long-term vision of what could happen one day.” Hill says the Griers have an excellent urban sensibility and want to see the site used to its fullest potential including preservation of existing historic structures and the Billy Goat Strut alley corridor. There’s currently no timeline for redeveloping the rest of the block.

Ron Turnier expects to attract over 200 chefs a week to the new Creation Gardens facility and anticipates that to draw the public as well. “Our new facility will be the shop where the chef’s shop and will be unlike any other market in the region,” Turnier explained. Creation Gardens will certainly help to anchor the East Market corridor as a center for food and art all the while providing for a grander long-term vision that could spread waves of redevelopment into surrounding properties and blocks. (Be sure to check out their booth at the Nulu Festival Saturday.)

Colonnade Cafeteria Heading Back To Starks Building

By Branden Klayko -

Sep 24, 2009

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Colonnade Cafe To Return To Starks Building

Three years after leaving the basement of the Starks Building at Fourth Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, the Colonnade Cafeteria has received a $40,000 forgivable loan from the city to relocate back to the building’s first floor.

Originally dating to 1913, the Colonnade Cafe was located in the Starks Building from 1926 until 2006 when a new owner asked the popular lunch-spot to vacate. Colonnade owners Chester and Kenneth Krill then moved to the fifth floor penthouse of the Louisville Antique Mall on Broadway, but were again dislocated when the mall closed earlier this year.

The first floor space at the Starks Building has had a hard time attracting a tenant since Rodes, a clothing company, moved to the suburbs several years ago. An upscale seafood restaurant, McCormick & Schmicks’ was once planned for the spot, and then the Cordish Companies planned an extension of 4th Street Live! to connect with the planned Center City project. Both fell through, leaving room for the Colonnade to move in.

In 2006, the Colonnade owners claimed that affordable leases in Downtown were difficult to find for a local breakfast and lunch restaurant, but as retail prices have fallen, such a local cafe can now afford one of the most prime retail spots in the city once thought to be reserved for high-end national chains.

East Broadway: Louisville Antique Mall Closing (Broken Sidewalk)
Colonnade Cafeteria On Broadway (Broken Sidewalk)

Jane Jacobs Would Have Bought Shoes In Louisville

By Branden Klayko -

Sep 24, 2009

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Last vestiges of Louisville''s shoe market

As you should know by now, Jane Jacobs is one of my favorite urbanists, and her pivotal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a must read for any urban thinker (it’s long, you’ll just have to get through it). Jane lived in New York’s West Village neighborhood and largely became an urbanist by chance as she watched city life play out all around her. In Death and Life, she describes how cities work (or don’t) and what makes them thrive.

While her book deals predominantly with New York, Jacobs felt Louisville was worthy of mention, much to the credit of Grady Clay, a local writer, urbanist, and winner of the Athena Medal. Jacobs describes the importance of a diverse set of uses in a neighborhood or district. An area may have a “primary use” off of which other uses revolve, but diversity is key.

Jacobs describes how a variety of people should be able to interact while going about a variety of tasks at a variety of times, whether its going grocery shopping, stopping by a printing shop, moving about during the workday, or buying a pair of shoes. In short, it’s a classic recipe for vibrant street life.

Louisville once had a large and vibrant shoe market around what was once the Haymarket and what will eventually be the Nucleus campus. This was before Interstate 65 sliced through the area, obliterating much of what once existed. Here’s an excerpt from Death and Life of Great American Cities:

Primary uses can be unusual sometimes. In Louisville, since the war a great sample shoe market, for bargain, odd-lot shoes, has gradually grown up in about thirty stores concentrated on four blocks of one street. Grady Clay, a real estate editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and a leading city design and planning critic, reports that the group has about a half-million pairs of shoes on display and in warehouses. “This is in the inner gray area,” Mr Clay writes me, “but as soon as the word got around, customers began flocking in from all over, so that you see Indianapolis, Nashville, Cincinnati shoppers, plus a good Cadillac trade. I have been thinking a bit about it. Nobody could have planned this growth. Nobody has encouraged it. The biggest threat, in fact, is the expressway which will cut diagonally across. Nobody at City Hall seems at all concerned about it. I hope to stir up some interest…

The last remnants of this vast “shoe district” can still be seen on the corner of Market and Preston Streets (see photos), but imagine 30 stores and 500,000 shoes! Does anyone remember the area when it was organically flourishing as described by Jacobs and Clay? It seems Louisville has been weird for much longer than we thought.

Local Urbanist Grady Clay Receives Athena Award (Broken Sidewalk)

Ticketing Drivers For Blasting Through A Crosswalk

By Branden Klayko -

Sep 23, 2009

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StreetsBlog points us to a police sting in Sacramento, this time targeting bad driving behaviors such as not yielding to pedestrians. When I first watched this clip, it seemed a little too good to be true, that dangerous drivers endangering pedestrians would be held accountable, but a plain-clothes officer spent the day walking back and forth across the street to show just how regular such a violation is.

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Initial Phase of $40 Million Riverview Park To Begin

By Branden Klayko -

Sep 23, 2009

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Riverview Park Master Plan (Courtesy Metro Louisville)

Construction of the first phase of Riverview Park is set to begin in the Spring of 2010 in Southwestern Louisville near Pleasure Ridge Park. Mayor Abramson and Councilman Rick Blackwell made the announcement yesterday about the project that will include $1.9 million in upgrades.

Located at the corner of Greenwood Road and Cane Run Road, the 87-acre park will take several years to complete, built in phases and overseen by the Waterfront Development Corporation just like Waterfront Park. Plans for the first phase include building a new boat ramp, improving parking areas, and constructing a new play- and sprayground with $300,000 donated by Humana founder Mr. and Mrs. David A. Jones.

Riverview Park isn’t new, and in terms of landscape architecture, isn’t currently anything special. The new master plan, devised by local landscape architecture firm Carman of Clay Street will change a grassy lawn and smattering of forest into one of the best parks in the city with a final price tag estimated at $30 to $40 million.

Mayor Abramson waxes poetic about the new park:

The natural beauty of this landscape—with its dense tree canopy, the lapping water of the Ohio River and the view of lush greenery of Southern Indiana—will create a lasting legacy for generations to come… It’s another example of our plan to transform Louisville into a City of Parks.

Situated on both sides of a levee, the new Riverview Park helps to bridge what could have otherwise been a visually and physically daunting barrier. The new plan provides for a gradual earthen ramp on each side of the levee to meet with the Levee Trail, part of a planned 100-plus-mile Louisville Loop. The new splash park will be located alongside this new ramp on the Ohio River side of the levee.

Landscapes are manipulated in a similarly geometric fashion as Hargreaves Associates’ Waterfront Park, allowing for dramatic ridges and swales all generally conforming to a circular path to inform the spatial layout of the park. Several iconic spaces will surely become as familiar as the Great Lawn Downtown. Features include a terraced lawn with a set of grand stairs, several overlooks, an amphitheater, a grand promenade, and various playing fields.

Among the most interesting planned features are a series of meandering footpaths transporting the visitor through a succession of landscapes. Walking through the southern edge of the park, one will progress from the more formal promenade into a meadowland followed by a savannah intermixed with woodlands. At the end of the journey lies a grand earthen observation hill and a ramp from which the park-goer can gaze up and down the Ohio River.

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Boarded Chestnut Street Church Could Become Community Asset

By Branden Klayko -

Sep 23, 2009

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Quinn Chapel on Chestnut Street (Circa 1980 via NRHP / NPS)

Quinn Chapel on Chestnut Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)

A boarded up church dating to 1884 at 912 West Chestnut Street between 9th & 10th Streets could one day see new life as a sort of community center for the West Downtown – East Russell neighborhoods. The old Quinn Chapel Church has a long and interesting history and is now owned by the adjacent YMCA of Greater Louisville at Chestnut and 10th Streets. Rodney Martin, District Executive Director of the YMCA, told us that options for the building are currently being considered and a plan could be announced as early as the end of the year.

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Tuesday News Roundup

By Broken Sidewalk -

Sep 22, 2009

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Happy World Car Free Day. What are your stories for the day? Did you give up your car? Do you always go car free? Did you think about it? Did you know today was a car free day? Perhaps you saw the “zany” folks from CART cheering on cyclists, bus riders, and pedestrians on Frankfort Avenue at the railroad tracks? Tell your story or your resolution for next year in the comments.

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Friday News Roundup

By Broken Sidewalk -

Sep 18, 2009

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Nicely done, John and Neil, for correctly identifying Wednesday’s sidewalk photo as Reutlinger Avenue looking toward Oak Street in the Germantown neighborhood. Here’s a new sidewalk photo to last you through the weekend. Guesses, as always, in the comments.

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Wednesday News Roundup

By Broken Sidewalk -

Sep 16, 2009

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Congrats to Patrick for correctly identifying yesterday’s sidewalk photo as Bonnycastle Avenue in the Deer Park neighborhood. Here’s a new photo ready for guesses. Also, I apologize if you were trying to contact me via phone in the last two days. AT&T’s network has apparently been overloaded in New York (and in Louisville, too, I read) and has not connected several calls. On with the news.

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