Last week, while walking down East Washington Street, I stopped to take in the grandeur that is St. Joseph Catholic Church. This is a familiar ritual as this block in Butchertown is one of the best in the city. While staring at the building, reportedly with the tallest spires in the city, I noticed a hand above the central door. The carving was small and high above the sidewalk, but was this hand flipping me off? I saw one middle outstretched finger, but the index finger was obscured by the background. Strangely vulgar carving for a church, I thought.
Upon closer inspection, the index finger appeared from its stone field and the revelation of the peace symbol made everything okay. In reality, the sign is a religious one. It appears to be a version of the sign of the cross, and with the thumb extended could represent the Trinity. A version of this Trinity reference became a popular greeting in Eastern Europe known as the three-fingered salute.
After looking at this church for years, new details continually reveal themselves each time. The church was built in 1883.
The new Butchertown Fire Station on Spring Street near Story Avenue opened last week (has it really been since last October that we checked in?) and now it’s time to take a look at how the finished building stacks up to the rendering. It’s well… nearly identical. It’s rare to see such a close match.
The new station replaces the Frankfort Avenue station at Pope Street which was designed to handle a single, horse-drawn fire wagon in 1891. The new station has three bays able to handle larger modern equipment and was designed by Studio A Architecture to incorporate elements from the neighborhood to help the building fit in the historic neighborhood.
The finished building may be made of red brick but it’s really green. The design includes geothermal heating and cooling, pervious concrete to slow rainwater runoff, and energy-efficient LED lights in the dormitories. A new fire station recently opened in Portland and another is undergoing design for the Beechmont neighborhood.
The old fire station building will eventually be sold for redevelopment, but the process hasn’t begun yet. The City hopes to sit down with the neighborhood and developers to figure out what use would be best for the historic building and the Clifton neighborhood. The building won’t be sold to a speculative buyer, but someone with a plan in mind to improve the community.
Sorry posting is a little slow; trying to get the new BS site improvements finished along with a thousand and one other things that need finishing. Thanks for all the kudos on our birthday and all the interest in helping out with the site. Hopefully year two will be even better.
One year ago today, we posted our first story: a groundbreaking. Since then, we’ve tried to bring you the story of Louisville. To be honest, when the BS first started, we wondered how long it would be before we ran out of stories. One year down and we’ve found we can’t keep up. The deeper you look, the more interesting Louisville is.
In its analysis of the deadly ammonia leak at an industrial site near the University of Louisville this week, LEO‘s FatLip blog brought up a good point (and also advanced one of our own) about the haphazard industrial areas in Louisville: can they be fixed? Large tracts of Louisville’s urban areas are filled with these industrial zones, and they often divide neighborhoods, thwart development, or are generally ugly. There are perfectly logical historical explanations of location for most (we won’t go into that here), but they grew up a long, long time ago in a different era.
We walked by the ZirMed Towers at the corner of Ninth Street and market Street a couple days ago and thought the building looked like it was almost done. We knew from our exclusive visit inside the construction site in February that the ZirMed Corporation offices would be done first, and today the C-J confirmed that the move-in has officially begun in the office level floors.
Later, a parking garage will be built adjacent to the tower with sidewalk retail and a landscaped courtyard will form the grand entrance to the Towers. City Properties Group, developers of the ZirMed Towers, plan to expand their Glassworks District in the future for blocks around. Plans are always changing with the changing economy, but tentative plans for the area include building another building of similar on the opposite corner of the same block.
We appreciate how the ZirMed Towers push the boundaries of Downtown and lend mass to the grand Ron Wilkins Boulevard – Ninth Street Corridor. In an area characterized mostly by expansive surface level parking lots, new construction is always welcome.
