Oak Street through Old Louisville hasn’t been the same since the closure of the Rudyard Kipling almost two years ago. Known to locals as The Rud, the bar-restaurant-venue occupied the 422 West Oak Street site since the mid-1980s.
Founders Ken and Sheila Pyle sold the property in 2013 after years on the market. The new owners William and Amy Enix brought a tradition for Sunday brunch in 2014 to the space, but the space closed again in June 2015.
The old Rudyard Kipling is being transformed. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
But construction is ramping up on the site’s next incarnation: a live–work–retail space that aims to bring new life to the street. Emmanuel Dumigron and his fiancée, Mia Snell, purchased the property for $350,000 this past March.
The new concept brings a new retail art gallery, a residence for Dumigron and Snell, and two work spaces to the site.
The retail space is called Obsidian. “It’s Mia’s baby,” Dumigron told Broken Sidewalk. Snell will sell her Dandelion Louisville line alongside other local artists and a few hand-picked from other states. The gallery will be accessed through a new entrance directly off Oak Street. Look for jewelry, lighting, painting, and furniture at the store. Obsidian will have its own work space managed by Snell.
The new facade of Obsidian. (Courtesy Urban 1, LLC)
“A lot of [Mia’s] art pieces are based on taxidermy and bones and nature,” Dumigron said. “In terms of the art, she is a little more on the darker side of things.” Obsidian is a black volcanic rock sought for its healing properties.
To the side, the old entrance to the Rud will be covered in iron gates, only to be opened during special events. The front facade will be painted in a neutral coat of paint.
The classic elephant-shaped sign above the side entry is in for some changes as well. “Landmarks has said we could take it down and put up new sign,” Dumigron said. “But we can’t legally change the shape.” The original plywood of the elephant is badly deteriorated. He said the new one would be more in keeping with the new shop. He expected paint colors of black, gold, and turquoise.
“We’re probably going to keep one of the originals for ourselves,” he said. But if you’re nostalgic about the old Rud, the couple plans to auction the other elephant sign at a special event in the future.
“We’re changing the zoning to mixed-use,” Dumigron said. That made fire barriers between the house and the front store more difficult. “Unfortunately for us, we have to separate the two buildings.”
An interior view of the front retail space under construction. (Courtesy Obsidian)
Dumigron’s solution, working with Charles Cash at Urban 1, LLC, is to open up a skylighted atrium, creating an outdoor courtyard and water feature between the house and shop. The skylight structure will remain as a pergola. This intervention keeps the two halves united while giving the historic house some breathing space.
“Our residence is where the stage was—or where they did the Sunday brunch,” Dumigron said. The wide-open space will be converted into the house’s 2,200-square-foot living room perfect for entertaining. “Mia and I want to have four annual events held in the living room and courtyard.” A kitchen in the back with be defined by a nine-foot-by-nine-foot floating wall. Upstairs are the living quarters.
In the back of the property, Dumigron’s companies, Briton Bees and Broken Masterpieces, will have workshop space. He specializes in vintage British racing motorcycles from before 1963. “I deal with oddities,” he said. The shop will include a fabrication studio to remake lost parts.
Dumigron has fixed up buildings across the country from Asheville to Wilmington—to six structures in Butchertown. He started the Louis’s The Ton bar at Frankfort and Story avenues when he moved here from Asheville four years ago. He sold that operation to Isaiah and Angela Hoagland for $465,000 in March.
For now, keep an eye out for changes happening on Oak Street—Dumigron is wasting no time getting the project completed. “I should be done with the residence by the end of the month,” Dumigron said. “We’ll be living there by the end of the month.”
By the end of June, Obsidian should be open.
“We’re really excited about reviving this space and getting our feet into the neighborhood,” Dumigron said. “We want to see what we can move and shake down here and see what we can contribute. We have the potential to make some noise in a positive way.”
While Gormley, Classic Empire, and other top racehorses prepare for the 143rd Kentucky Derby this week, many locals are bracing for the tourist-fueled frenzy that has already saturated the city.
Yes, the most exciting two minutes in sports is upon us. Widely regarded as Louisville’s most prestigious cultural asset, its origins stem from a long history of racing traditions that pre-date the Derby by more than a century.
Beginning in the late 1700s, wealthy pioneers from Virginia brought with them racing steeds, imported from England, to their new settlements in Kentucky. Most notable of these Virginian landowners was William Whitley, who constructed the state’s first unofficial race track in 1788 on his estate in Lincoln County.
According to tradition, the settlers realized that the limestone-filled hills were leaching magnesium and calcium into the bluegrass, which they believe helped build strong bones in the horses that grazed upon it. By the year 1800, horses were so popular in Kentucky that 92 percent of taxpayers in the state were equine owners.
Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. (Courtesy American Heroes Blog)
But if there’s one person who’s highly cited for popularizing horse racing in Kentucky, it’s Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr.—the great nephew of Louisville founder George Rogers Clark.
At the age of six, Clark Jr. lost his mother, Abigail Prather Churchill, and was forced to live with his his uncles, John and Henry. However, his mother’s side of the family was wealthy and well-known as horse breeders; the family estate included 300 acres of land in South Louisville, much of which was used for equine training.
It wasn’t until 1872, when he visited the Epsom Derby in England, that he developed a proclivity for the fancy things: seersucker suits, champagne, and equestrian sport. These customs followed Clark Jr. to Louisville and became the foundation for what is now known as Derby fashion.
When he returned to Louisville the following year, Clark Jr. and his associates worked to establish an American version of the Epsom Derby, which was to be a series of permanent races in which the winners all faced off in the final contest: the Kentucky Derby. This plan led to the formation of the Louisville Jockey Club and Driving Park Association, founded in 1874.
The original grandstand at Churchill Downs looks very different than today’s.
Churchill Downs’s original Gothic-style grandstand and clubhouse were constructed in 1875, modeled after Epsom Downs in Surrey. English architect and civil engineer John Andrewartha drew up the design. That early facility had the proud distinction of housing the only indoor toilet for miles around.
The Kentucky Derby opened on Monday, May 17, 1875, on the inaugural meeting of the Louisville Jockey Club. It had been competing against two other races that day, both of which were considerably more popular: the Louisville Cup and the Gentlemen’s Cup Race.
Oliver Lewis, an African-American jockey, rode Aristides to the finish line and was crowned the winner of the first-ever Kentucky Derby. Soon after, Thoroughbred racing rose to prominence as the most prevalent sport in the state.
Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in 1943. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
In 1894, architect Joseph D. Baldez from D.X. Murphy & Brother (known today as Luckett & Farley) was responsible for designing a new grandstand for Churchill Downs. He ended up creating the most iconic architectural statement in Kentucky—the Twin Spires—as an ornamental afterthought.
Today, Churchill Downs stands as the only remaining horse racing venue in the city, but it wasn’t the first. Not by a long shot. Louisville boasted a plethora of racing tracks over the years. They have long since vanished, but have not been forgotten. Here are six of the most notable.
Louisville Downs depicted on a racing program from 1976.
Louisville Downs
With its red-and-white striped roof visible from the Watterson Expressway, this standardbred park once occupied an 87-acre parcel on Poplar Level Road and featured harness racing on it’s half-mile track.
Founded by William H. King, who the Courier-Journal lauded as being “the track’s longtime marketing mastermind,” Louisville Downs opened to the public in 1966 and boasted a glass-enclosed grandstand and an infield lake.
In 1981, King introduced “Call-A-Bet,” the state’s first phone wagering system. Seven years later, he began simulcasting races at the track and included broadcasts from Turfway Park in Northern Kentucky.
Churchill Downs purchased the site for $6 million in September 1991 and transformed the track into a Thoroughbred training arena known as Trackside. The deal officially brought an end to harness racing in Louisville.
In 2015, the decision was made to demolish the iconic grandstand, wherein officials cited structural deterioration. However, the original stables and track are still used by Churchill Downs as a training facility.
Douglass Park Jockey Club.
Douglas Park
Historical Marker No. 2336.
Next time you’re in the Beechmont neighborhood, take a leisurely stroll down Kenwood Way. Watch for the intersection where Second Street turns into Southside Drive, and you’ll discover Historical Marker No. 2336, which notes the former location of Douglas Park race track.
Wedged between what is now Americana Community Center and Strawberry Lane, the original Douglas Park occupied 122 acres and featured stables, a clubhouse, a grandstand not unlike Churchill Downs, and a track that stretched one mile across.
Douglass Park.
Colonel James J. Douglas founded his namesake track in 1895, the same year the park opened to the public. Initially, Douglas Park was to be used exclusively for trotting and pacing races, but after a seven year hiatus, the venue switched to Thoroughbred racing when it reopened in 1913.
Former site of Douglass Park.
In 1918, Churchill Downs purchased Douglas Park and immediately halted all races at the track. Nearly 20 years later, the Douglas Park grandstand and clubhouse were demolished. Successive fires throughout the 1940s and ‘50s destroyed numerous barns and stables, and portions of the property were sold off to recoup the losses.
The Archdiocese of Louisville purchased 21 acres of the Douglas Park property in 1950. St. John Vianney now stands on the site. After selling off the remaining horses and stables, Churchill Downs ended all equine activity at Douglas Park in 1958. They leveled all remaining barns on the property and seeded the ground with grass, leaving the rest to history.
1873 map of Louisville showing Elm Tree Garden on Shippingport Island.
Elm Tree Garden
Considered to be Louisville’s first amusement park, Elm Tree Garden (originally Elm Tree Pavilion) was founded upon Shippingport Island and opened to the public on June 6, 1829. The Garden was created by Joseph L. Detiste, a French native, and featured mazes, puzzle gardens, and a race track.
During this time, the Falls of the Ohio was primarily occupied by French settlers, whose fur-trading businesses carried them upriver from New Orleans. This was also the age when horse racing in Louisville was at its peak and competitions frequently took place on downtown streets.
In an attempt to draw pedestrian traffic away from busy thoroughfares, the Elm Tree Garden advertised its own horse races and even provided a gondola service to ferry people across the Ohio River.
However, the Garden never fully recovered from the economic losses following the flood of 1832. After years of financial struggle, the amusement park was permanently closed in 1873.
The Woodlawn Vase. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Woodlawn Race Course
The story of Woodlawn Race Course began in 1858, when a wealthy horse breeder named Robert Aitcheson Alexander purchased a tract of land on the eastern border of Jefferson County, in what is now the Woodlawn Park neighborhood.
The Woodlawn Vase. (Courtesy Maryland Historical Society)
The race track proved to be a massive success when it opened to the public in 1859, attracting large crowds of people dressed in colorful attire. Such vibrant gatherings were previously unheard of in Kentucky, but the tradition endured and carried over into other racing venues of the day, including, of course, Churchill Downs.
Most of the accounts regarding the park’s design and layout come from the Louisville Daily Courier, a defunct newspaper that ran throughout the 1850s and ‘60s. Some sources say the interior of the clubhouse was elaborately decorated with intricate crown moldings and mantelpieces. Others claim the building had a tin roof equipped with an overhead hatch.
During the park’s heyday, Alexander had commissioned Tiffany & Company to design a special vase as a trophy for the winners. What resulted was the Woodlawn Vase, which served as the template for the current trophy given to the winner of the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, Maryland.
Woodlawn earned the reputation of being the “Saratoga of the West”—a reference to a race course in Saratoga Springs, New York, that was popular throughout the 1860s. However, like many race tracks at that time, Woodlawn couldn’t sustain its debts and was forced to close in 1870.
Miles Park.
Miles Park
Located on the southern terminus of Cecil Avenue in the Parkland neighborhood, this track opened as a full-time racing venue in June 1956 as Fairgrounds Speedway. The track and original grandstands date further back as part of the old Kentucky State Fairgrounds facility. The venue was initially used for harness racing, but after two years, the park was sold to General J. Fred Miles, who turned it into a Thoroughbred track and renamed it Miles Park.
Miles Park at the old fairgrounds.
Equine business writer Bill Shanklin recalled the early racing days at Miles Park as being intimate events, where “someone was always willing to provide you with a tip on a ‘sure winner’ that usually did not turn out that way.”
The park came under new management in 1974 and was renamed, this time as Commonwealth Race Course. Legal entanglements between the park’s new owners and the Kentucky Racing Commission caused the track to fall dormant for several years.
The old fairgrounds and race track in 1929. (Courtesy UL Photo Archives – Reference)
Things eventually picked up in 1977 when, once again, new owners purchased the park and experimented with quarter horse racing. But success didn’t last long. In June 1978, a fire destroyed the grandstand, forcing the park to permanently shut down. Industrial facilities now occupy the site, with no markers recognizing the history of racing that once took place there.
“Oakland House and Race Course” by Augustus A. Von Smith and Robert Brammer is in the collection of the Speed Art Museum.
Oakland Race Course
This course was developed through a sponsorship from the Louisville Association for the Improvement of Breed of Horses, for which Samuel Churchill served as the president. In 1832, the group purchased a 55-acre plot of land on modern-day 7th Street and Magnolia Avenue in the Old Louisville neighborhood and founded the Oakland Race Course.
According to The Encyclopedia of Louisville, edited by John E. Kleber, Oakland premiered to the public in the fall of 1833 and included a three-story clubhouse and enough stables to house 120 horses. Six years later, promoter Yelverton C. Oliver organized a $14,000 match race between thoroughbreds Grey Eagle and Louisiana’s Wagner in what became known as “the greatest race west of the Alleghenies.”
It was hoped that the event would help pull Oakland out of financial hardship. But after years of struggle, the facility eventually closed, with its last race held in the mid 1850s. Perhaps one of the best-preserved artifacts from the course is an 1840 painting titled “Oakland House and Race Course” by Augustus A. Von Smith and Robert Brammer (pictured above), which reveals a wooded fairground bordered by a white picket fence.
(Top image depicts 1929 Kentucky Derby winner Clyde Van Dusen and jockey Linus McAfee draped in roses on a very muddy track. Courtesy UL Photo Archives – Reference.)
Damage from a motorist hitting a building in Old Louisville. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Recently, we profiled the rebuilding of a historic building on the corner of East Broadway and Shelby Street after it was hit by a speeding, wrong-way driver. With a little help from co-owners at Forza Architecture and 5253 Design Group, the building is looking as good as ever. “They built things so much more robust back then than they do now,” Stephen Tracy, principal at Forza, told Broken Sidewalk. “This building is very solid. There was never a question of whether we were going to take it down all the way.” That’s lucky for Louisville. More often, a building hit by a motorist is torn down or left severely disfigured.
It turns out that motorists hitting stationary objects—houses, stores, power lines, bridges—is exceedingly common in Louisville and across the country. According to the Storefront Safety Council, an advocacy group that keeps tabs on such crashes, motorists drive their cars into commercial buildings 60 times a day across the country (that doesn’t count houses or other objects). Those crashes claim 500 lives annually and cause over 4,000 injuries. Not to mention losses to business and the economy due to repairs or potential demolition.
These crashes—and the way the media covers them—helps illustrate just how much of a car-centric society we’ve become. Reading most headlines, you’d think we’ve already embraced autonomous vehicles and rogue cars are gunning for our homes. The passive voice conceals a human was involved at all. Sometimes a news story even makes the event into a sort of joke, showing just how jaded to street violence we’ve become. People’s lives are at stake here.
Worse, they illustrate how dangerous we’ve allowed our streets to be designed. Modern traffic engineering focused solely on automobile efficiency and speed creates deadly places for people. We need to completely rethink our approach to street design to take into account safety for all users—especially on our major streets and arterials that provide the most connections throughout the city. Speed, lane width, sidewalks, street trees, meaningful density, and geometric design all play a part in creating a safer environment for everyone.
A motorist drove into the patio of Webb’s Market in Phoenix Hill. (Courtesy Webb’s Market / Facebook)
Many incidents of drivers hitting buildings go unnoticed, without mention in the news. For instance, we were the only outlet to cover the the demise of a 160-year-old Phoenix Hill building after motorists collided on Jefferson Street in 2015. Plenty of others do make headlines, especially when a spectacular partial collapse is involved like on Broadway. We collect the headlines locally under our Carnage analysis section. And there are a lot of them. Take a look below for a 14-month roundup of only media published motorist vs. building crashes in the Louisville area.
February 2016: A motorist hits a house on Cane Run Road in Shively, sending several people to the hospital. The crash site was near Cane Run Elementary School. (WLKY)
February 2016: A drunk driver crashes his car into the front of Za’s Pizza Pub at 1573 Bardstown Road, destroying the front entrance and part of a wall. The driver was later arrested. (Facebook, WDRB, WHAS11, C-J)
February 2016: A motorist crashed his car into Captain’s Cellar liquor store, 2915 Brownsboro Road. The front entrance was destroyed, one person was hospitalized, and the business was closed for several months. (WAVE3 plus Update)
February 2016: A motorist drove his car into a house in Shepherdsville. One person was taken to the hospital. (WDRB)
February 2016: A taxi cab driver crashed into the front of the Hampton Place Apartments at 16th and Chestnut streets. The car smashed through a brick wall and window into the living room of an apartment. (WDRB, WAVE3)
March 2016: A motorist drove his car into a house at West Pages Lane and Devonshire Drive in Pleasure Ridge Park. “I was just laying there getting ready to get up for work and I just heard the boom from the wreck,” the homeowner told WAVE3. “It sounded like a bomb went off in the house.” (WDRB, WAVE3)
March 2016: A motorist hits a corner commercial building at the corner of Oak and Sixth streets. (Facebook comment)
April 2016: A motorist drives his car into a house in Newburg, smashing through a brick wall and window into the living room. Several injuries were reported. (WHAS11)
April 2016: A motorist drives into an Old Louisville corner store at Second and Oak streets. This isn’t the first time this structure has been hit, either. It’s become a common target in the neighborhood. A resident living above the shop said the crash felt like an earthquake. (Facebook)
May 2016: A motorist drove a car into an Old Louisville dry cleaners at Third and Oak streets, taking out a glass facade wall. (WLKY)
May 2016: A FedEx driver came within feet of hitting the Vogue Center on Lexington Road in St. Matthews after confusing the gas and brake pedals. The crash took out a large SUV instead. (WDRB, WLKY)
May 2016: A man drove a stolen car into a gas station convenience store in Jeffersonville, hitting two parked cars along the way. The man led police on a chase into Clark County before he was arrested. (WDRB)
June 2016: A motorist drove into Bypass Liquors, 3632 Seventh Street Road. (WAVE3)
July 2016: Four motorists were involved in a dramatic crash that sent their cars into a Jeffersontown home on Summerfield Drive near South Hurstbourne Lane. The incident was road rage related and neighbors pulled the trapped motorists from the house’s basement as gasoline rushed in. (WDRB plus Update)
August 2016: A drunk driver crashed his car into a house full of people on Robinwood Road, injuring one of them. The driver fled the scene but was later arrested at his home. (WDRB)
August 2016: A motorist drove his car into an adult entertainment club on Seventh Street Road near Berry Boulevard in Shively. (WDRB, WAVE3)
September 2016: A woman crashed her car into the front of a Cricket store on Dixie Highway. (WLKY)
October 2016: A TARC bus driver veered off the road, hitting a utility pole on Bardstown Road near Taylorsville Road. The crash knocked out power for 1,400 residents in the Highlands Douglass neighborhood. (C-J)
November 2016: A motorist died after hitting a utility pole and then driving into an abandoned church at 12th and Kentucky streets in the California neighborhood. (WDRB, WAVE3, C-J)
November 2016: A motorist drove a car into a utility pole at Brook and Lee streets in Old Louisville before fleeing the scene. (WDRB, WAVE3)
December 2016: A motorist drove his car into a corner commercial building at 18th and Jefferson streets in the Russell neighborhood. Police had been attempting to pull the driver over. A woman was arrested and a man fled the scene. (WAVE3, WLKY)
December 2016: A motorist crashed a stolen vehicle into Volleyball Connection on Baxter Avenue in Irish Hill. “It took out the window, three layers of brick,” the business owner told WAVE3. “It’s crazy that something could have so much destruction.” The driver had led police on a chase to the crash site from way out in Jeffersontown. (WLKY, WAVE3)
December 2016: A wrong-way motorist drove into a corner commercial building at the corner of East Broadway and Shelby Street in Phoenix Hill causing a partial collapse. The structure has since been repaired. (Broken Sidewalk)
February 2017: A carjacker attempted to steal a car from a daycare at the corner of Fifth Street and Winkler Avenue in the South Louisville neighborhood only to end up driving it into the building. Children were inside at the time but none were hurt. The carjacker fled the scene. (WLKY, WDRB)
February 2017: A motorist hit a utility pole on Westport Road near the Watterson Expressway, knocking out power for 2,250 people in the area. (WDRB)
February 2017: A motorist drove a pickup truck into a house at Taylor Boulevard near Bluegrass Avenue on the border of the Beechmont and Hazelwood neighborhoods. The homeowner said the driver attempted to flee, but was arrested by police. The crash site is across the street from Hazelwood Elementary School. (WDRB)
February 2017: A motorist drove his car into a utility pole at Frankfort and Clifton avenues in the Clifton neighborhood. He was found unconscious with his foot on the gas pedal, passed out from using heroin, and was arrested. The Washington Postreported recently that Driving Under the Influence of Drugs (DUID) is increasing at alarming rates across the country compared to Driving Under the Influence (DUI), making traffic violence harder to fight. (WDRB)
February 2017: A motorist hit a utility pole near the Louisville International Airport, knocking out power for the entire facility and delaying some incoming flights. (WDRB)
February 2017: A motorist suspected of drinking drove a car into a utility pole at Bardstown Road at the Douglass Loop. The car burst into flames and two people were pulled from the wreckage by a good samaritan and a police officer. (WDRB)
March 2017: A motorist suspected of drinking drove a car into a building and construction site on Greenwood Road near Terry Road in Pleasure Ridge Park. The driver was arrested.(WAVE3, WHAS11, WDRB)
March 2017: A motorist crossing the Second Street Bridge veered off course and slammed his car into the span’s steel structure. Workers in the area said the driver had been speeding and the car’s battery was ejected due to the force of the crash. (Facebook)
March 2017: A motorist drove a car into a Beverage Warehouse liquor store on Bardstown Road south of the Watterson Expressway. (C-J)
April 2017: A motorist drove a minivan into Webb’s Market on the corner of Muhammad Ali Boulevard and Wenzel Street, smashing a brick wall and patio next to the corner store. (Facebook)
Crime
Another unfortunate trend involving motorists driving into buildings is the intentional act—using a car as a battering ram for a robbery. In less than 24 hours last July, motorists rammed two gun shops—one in Jeffersontown and another in Fern Valley—stealing guns and sparking a SWAT incident in one case (WLKY, WDRB, WDRB). In December, a motorist intentionally drove a vehicle through a shoe store at Cane Run Road near Crums Lane in Shively. Police said the suspect stole “lots of Air Jordans” (WDRB). And this past March, a Wisconsin woman was arrested after intentionally driving a vehicle into a store at New Cut Road near Palatka Road (WDRB).
New research monitoring cell phone use while driving suggests the scale of motorist distraction is off the charts.
Motorists with smartphones use hand-held devices in 88 out of every 100 trips, according to data collected by Zendrive, a company that assesses driving behavior using the sensors in smartphones. More than three quarters of drivers—77 percent—have smartphones. Extrapolating to the entire population, Zendrive estimates there are about 600 million trips involving distracted driving in the United States each day.
Nationwide, traffic deaths have risen at an alarming rate in recent years, and cellphone use is often cited as a potential culprit, but data is limited. Federal agencies including the CDC and the NHTSA have estimated that distracted driving is a factor in about one in 10 traffic deaths annually. But the research from Zendrive indicates the extent of the problem may be much larger.
The darker the color, the higher the incidence of distracted driving by state. (Courtesy Zendrive)
The dataset was collected over 90 days from 10 billion miles driven by 5 million motorists with Zendrive’s tech running on their devices, including both professional drivers and non-professionals.
Prior research has determined that taking your eyes off the road for as little as two seconds can make a collision four to 24 times more likely. The Zendrive data suggests drivers often engage in several distracting incidents in a single trip. During an average one-hour trip, drivers spent 3.5 minutes using their phones. (Zendrive counted only “digital manipulation” of phones, not hands-free use, though the company acknowledges that hands-free use also impairs cognition while driving.)
Oregon was the least distracted state and Vermont was the most. In Vermont, drivers spent an average of 7.5 percent of driving time texting or using apps on their phones. In Oregon, it was about 3.5 percent.
(Editor’s Note: Kentucky ranks as the 36th most distracted state, according to the study. The state is not among a handful of those that prohibit cellphone use while driving.)
State laws banning the use of hand-held phones while driving may have an effect. There are 16 states with such bans in effect, and six of those states are among the 10 least-distracted in Zendrive’s dataset. However, Vermont, the most distracted state, also has a cell phone ban.
(Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-published from Streetsblog. Broken Sidewalk is a founding member of Streetsblog Southeast, covering transportation and urbanism in the region. Top image by Vivian Nguyen / Flickr.)
Hyland Glass on Washington Street in Butchertown. (Google Street View)
A couple years ago, walking down Washington Street in Butchertown led you past unkempt empty lots, a handful of historic structures, and a blank warehouses, and a metal scrapyard filled to the brim with garbage. You still get that same look today, with one major change.
Enter Melanie Miller and Casey Hyland, owners of Hyland Glass. The couple purchased the scrap yard property at 721 East Washington and converted it into a glass blowing studio and gallery space. Their previous home on Main Street was being demolished to make way for a large-scale apartment complex, the Main & Clay.
Hyland Glass on Washington Street in Butchertown. (Courtesy Lojic)
But as they’ve settles in, Miller and Hyland have been pondering what to do with a grassy front yard in front of their building. “We thought we would build a house there and live in it,” Miller told Broken Sidewalk. “That’s every artist’s dream.”
Rawlins drew up a modern home that was convertible to other uses over time. “We could live in it as our house if we wanted or it was easily converted into a commercial office,” Miller said. “It was already approved and it’s ready to go if we want.”
But as time passed and the idea grew more real in their minds, Miller and Hyland began to get serious about how their property could support the arts in Butchertown. “We’re sitting on this pretty awesome piece of property in Butchertown,” Miller said. “We decided it should be an income generator to be able to continue as artists.”
Looking west down Washington Street. Hyland Glass is on the right. (Google Street View)
“A lot of the reason we’re able to sustain [our business] is that we own our building,” Miller said. “Somehow we were fortunate enough to land this piece of property. A revenue stream would be great. If we could develop the site respectfully and have great tenants that support the arts, then yes, of course, we’d like to see that.”
“We learned there’s a shortage of commercial office space in the Butchertown / Nulu area,” she continued. With the house on hold, Miller and Hyland looked to the larger, eastern side of their yard as a building site. They envision a new structure with a small retail store and offices on upper floors.
Miller said the current zoning allows them to build up to four stories on the front lot. “We’re the only section on eastern side that’s [zoned] commercial,” she explained.
Looking east on Washington Street. An historic set of townhouses sits adjacent to Hyland Glass while the south side of the street os dominated by generic metal warehouses. (Google Street View)
“We are in this commercial weird world,” Miller said. There’s a couple rowhouses to the west of the site split up into apartments and the Thomas Edison House is across a parking lot to the east. But on the south side, parking lots and faceless modern warehouses dominate the streetscape. And with Main & Clay quickly rising, the scale of the area is changing as well.
“We want it to facilitate a walkable neighborhood,” Miller said. That means finding the right tenants for the space. That means there could be a gallery, a professional office, a shop, or even a juice bar. “It could even be a laundromat. I’d love to have a laundromat near here,” Miller said. But Miller was adamant that a restaurant wouldn’t work. Butchertown’s floodwall cuts off alley access and trash and grease from such an operation would litter the sidewalk.
There has been interest and support for the project, but Miller noted that everyone knows this is still in the conceptual phase. Ideas generated so far include a holistic doctors office, an space for private music lessons, and offices for a digital agency. “Nothing concrete,” she said. “Most people are just interested in the project moving forward. The neighborhood seems to want it.”
Miller and Hyland haven’t begun work with an architect, but are deep into brainstorming what their building could look like. (Hyland holds an a degree in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis.) “We’re definitely going to keep the building as historically sensitive as possible,” Miller said. “That means brick, of course.” Any new structure, she said, would also conform to the existing street setback of the houses on the block. Miller noted how she loves the historic storefronts in the neighborhood.
The circa-1870 Hoke House. (Courtesy Kentucky Trust)
The couple is also considering the possibility of moving a threatened farmhouse on Wolf Pen Branch Road to the smaller western lot. The Kentucky Trust for Historic Preservation is seeking a new site for the circa-1870 Hoke House being displaced by a subdivision. And based on our crude to-scale map overlay, it looks like it could fit on the site.
Mock-up of the potential location of the Hoke House and a new 4-story structure. (Montage by Broken Sidewalk)
“A townhouse form, this house was built in an Italianate style of the period, though adapted in a vernacular farm house form,” the Kentucky Trust wrote of the Hoke House on its website. “Originally four rooms, a later kitchen addition was added to the main house. Though uninhabited for many years, the house is in good shape.”
“Within the next year we want to capitalize on the property,” Miller said. She and Hyland are awaiting the opening of the Main & Clay apartments at the corner to open up to see how the neighborhood dynamic changes. “In a perfect world, I’d love this time next year to be breaking ground,” she said.
But like all real estate projects, the Hyland Glass expansion will come down to financing. “For us, it’s going to come to getting back to the bank to see if we have enough money,” Miller said. Right now, they’re trying to drum up interest and find out if their project is viable.
But Miller is optimistic that Butchertown is ready. “There seems to be a lot going on and time is right,” she said. “The whole neighborhood is just moving pretty quickly.”
At 380 square miles, Louisville is a big place. In those miles, it’s filled with a diverse range of people all facing different situations in life. So how well do we understand our fellow Louisvillians? Does an east-end suburbanite really understand what it’s like to hear gunshots on a near daily basis? How does a family in Fern Creek make sense of Shelby Park’s aspirations to remake its streets as two-way? Does the Downtown empty-nester consort with the servers and clerks who work their neighborhood cafes and stores?
Urban planners, sociologists, and others have been attempting to answer these kinds of questions for centuries. The first to examine the “individual” in a “society” was Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1840 second volume of Democracy in America:
Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he exists only in himself and for himself along. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.
The essential question here concerns the health of public life.
There has always been socio-economic disparity in cities, notably as the industrial revolution shook up fundamental views of urbanism in the 19th century. But our modern practice of building, especially in the suburbs, has taken the notion to a new extreme. Throughout the 20th century till today, we build for smaller and smaller socio-economic sub-types. You got a raise and make a little more than your neighbors? Time for an upgrade to a new neighborhood! We see neighbors more and more that are just like ourselves. Tocqueville argues that creates an isolation that reinforces our own perception of the world.
We’ve further designed our cities for isolation, creating streets filled with sound-proof, single-occupant vehicles. Drive throughs, parking garages, and television or internet bubbles can create a nearly complete isolation loop. It’s important to understand how these factors are affecting our sense of community, how we relate to our fellow citizens, and the kind of culture we’re promoting in our city.
There have been volumes written about Tocqueville’s quote and its implications today. Among those investigating is Richard Sennet, author and professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. In summing up Tocqueville, Sennett wrote:
This individualized withdrawal seems the perfect recipe for complacency: you take for granted people like yourself and simply don’t care about those who aren’t like you; more, whatever their problems are, it’s their problem. Individualism and indifference become twins.
Similarly, professor Robin Goodwin wrote in a 1974 paper on the topic:
Individualism… has culminated in an ideology that equates liberty with the absence of all bonds, all commitments, all restraints upon individual action… The ideology of individualism is so powerful that we… look on bonds as restraints; on values as opinions or prejudices; on customs as impositions.
This is a subject we’ve discussed before in relation to other topics, and one we’ll surely return to here at Broken Sidewalk. It’s at the heart of so many of the questions we must answer in deciding what kind of city we want to live in. What’s your take on Tocqueville, Sennett, and Goodwin? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
There are 724 registered architects practicing in Kentucky, according to a new survey of the profession. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) has released its latest data, showing 109,748 architects practicing nationwide. How does Kentucky compare to other states around the region and country? Let’s dig into the data.
NCARB broke its data down into two categories: resident architects who live and work in the state and reciprocal architects who maintain a license to practice in Kentucky but live elsewhere. The survey counted a total of 2,630 architects who can legally build in the state. That’s 2.6 times the number of outside architects as local architects.
Crunching a few numbers, it becomes clear that Kentucky and its surrounding region are being designed by fewer architects than the rest of the nation.
Charts showing architects by state and per capita. Click to enlarge. (Broken Sidewalk / Source: NCARB, US Census)
Part of that stems from architecture as a trade attracted to larger cities. It’s no surprise that California, New York, and Texas are the states with the most resident architects. There, the locals vastly outnumber the out-of-towners.
Looking at local architects per state capita*, Kentucky also ranks low on the list. The Commonwealth has the sixth fewest architects per capita with one architect per 6,111 residents. Only Indiana (1:6,521), South Dakota (1:7,396), Mississippi (1:8,258), Delaware (1:8,505), and West Virginia (1:16,586) have fewer. Stack a few of those states together and you quickly see a regional picture.
* The NCARB survey used 2015 data, so we compared it with Census estimates from the same year to calculate our figures.
Washington, D.C. ranks at the top of the per capita list with one architect per 907 residents, but it’s a dense, urbanized area and therefore an outlier. Surprisingly, Hawaii (1:1,408) is the top state. Design powerhouses in New York, California, and Illinois rank lower at 6, 7, 8 respectively. The national average is one architect per 2,924 residents.
For another possible cause of Kentucky’s lower ranking of architects per capita, we have to go back to school. The only architecture school in the state is at the University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington. The state’s largest city, Louisville, has no such program and thus no annual influx of new students who might opt to stick around after they earn a degree.
And getting young talent to stick around is much sought after in top cities today. Young architects are likely to be experimental in their approach to urban living. They might look at cities and urban problems from new angles. They also help established firms grow and bring in the latest skills.
Architectural education in a city serves as a sort of spring of new ideas and talent. Architecture students are notorious for their workaholic natures, and studio projects most often focus on local sites. When you’ve got so many fresh eyes looking at a city where they’re learning to design, you can get some pretty amazing ideas. They invite the entire community to look at their built environment in new ways. In the past, UK has offered Louisville studios (like this great one studying Portland), but there’s nothing like a local program.
This is not to say that because Kentucky has fewer architects than other states that we necessarily have inferior architecture and design quality. There are immensely talented architects practicing in the Commonwealth alongside an array of other design professions. Many have achieved national praise for their work.
Still, there are some major challenges presented by the numbers. I’m repeatedly told how the practice of architecture in Louisville can feel stifled or too much like a business. The state is small enough where many architects do not want to speak up or take risks for fear of losing a client. And there’s the perpetual issue of whether a project should go to a local firm or be handed to a top-name out-of-towner.
We see it as about creating a culture of design—across all design professions, but especially architecture. Architects are trained and work differently than artists. It’s part of what makes an architectural education so special. The more people, the more eyes you have looking critically at important issues of design in the state, the better off we all are.
What are your thoughts on architecture in Kentucky and the region? Does Louisville need an architecture school? Are you an architect with another point of view? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky. As you recall, we’ve been watching Louisville closely, because just at the end of last year, the city started what amounts to a laboratory experiment in transportation behavior. Kentucky and Indiana built a new bridge to double the capacity of the Interstate 65 freeway as it crosses the Ohio River near Downtown Louisville. At the same time, it put tolls on the I-65 crossing, but not on the nearby Second Street Bridge, an older, four-lane highway bridge that connects Louisville to the Indiana suburbs north of the River.
As we reported in February, the initial month’s worth of data on bridge traffic shows that adding tolls (which run from $1 to $4 for cars) have caused traffic levels to fall by almost half, from about 122,000 vehicles per day to about 66,000. We showed photographs from area traffic-cams that show rush hour traffic on the tolled bridges almost empty, while traffic was fairly thick on the free Second Street Bridge.
Afternoon rush hour traffic in mid-February. (Trimarc)
The latest phase of our experiment came recently, courtesy of “Thunder Over Louisville,” a kind of combined concert, airshow, and fireworks display that is held annually. To handle the big crowds that come Downtown, and afford great vantage points, the city closes the Second Street Bridge. It did so on the Thursday before Thunder. So we looked to see how this affected traffic levels. (The festival itself didn’t start until Friday night, so Thursday was still a reasonably typical business day.)
Afternoon rush hour traffic with the Second Street Bridge closed. (Trimarc)
As you can see, traffic on the tolled I-65 bridges was still very light. (The photo below was taken about five minutes after 5:00p.m. on April 20 and comes from the local “TRIMARC” traffic monitoring website.) The peak direction of traffic is moving away from the camera’s vantage point, on the right hand side of the photo, northbound, from Downtown Louisville.
As noted, the Second Street Bridge was closed with barricades. This is the bridgehead in Downtown Louisville.
The closed Second Street Bridge. (Trimarc)
What these images suggest is that, even with the nearby free alternative closed, there’s way, way more capacity on I-65 than there is peak hour demand for travel. You can compare these photos to ones we captured two months ago (below) when the Second Street Bridge was open to traffic at rush hour. While ostensibly the crossing was widened from 6 lanes to 12 to eliminate congestion, the real congestion-fighting investment was the decision to ask users to pay just a portion of the cost of widening the road. With tolls in place, drivers have voted with their feet (or perhaps, wheels) that they didn’t really need additional capacity.
Charts showing trip purpose (left) and trip distribution by time of day (right). From ORBP’s 2013 traffic and revenue study.
(Editor’s Note: As part of a 2013 traffic and revenue study by the Ohio River Bridges Project, potential bridge users were asked of their habits and behaviors in crossing the river. As the above charts demonstrate, there’s a lot of flexibility in the trips being made. For instance, a leisure or shopping trip could be facilitated on another bridge or demand for such activities could be evaporated completely.)
There’s another point as well. It isn’t just that traffic has shifted to the “free” alternative. It’s that with tolling in place, apparently many other trips just simply evaporated. That tendency of traffic to disappear when there’s a toll is an indication that people have much more flexibility about when, where, and how much they travel than is usually contemplated in policy discussions or travel demand models. The mental model that says traffic levels are some inexorable natural force like the tides, which must be accommodated or else, is just wrong.
Of course, photos of one moment in time (even at the height of what should be rush hour) are hardly the best evidence of how well a bridge is being used. For that, we need actual traffic counts–the kind of data that would be generated, for example, if you had cameras, and license plate readers and transponder readers on a bridge, which is exactly what we have on I-65.
But while Riverlink, the toll-bridge operator quickly posted January’s weekly traffic counts on February 1, its website has no new traffic data for the intervening two-and-a-half months. In fact, the Riverlink website which featured more or less weekly press releases since November, contains no new press releases since that February 1 traffic data report.
(Editor’s Note: The day this article was originally published on City Observatory, Riverlink released its first quarter traffic counts. We’ve charted them below. While traffic typically peaks during the late summer months of July and August, there’s still a sizeable gap to be filled between actual counts and the state’s projection.)
Average Daily Traffic (ADT) by month for tolled bridges shown in blue with the 2017 total ADT projection shown in red (left). A chart showing projected traffic growth through 2052 (right). (Cource: Riverlink)
There are many reasons why they might not yet have pulled together the data, and we’ll be watching eagerly to see when it becomes available. But we couldn’t help but notice a story that appeared in local press this month. It turns out that the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet has just signed a $300,000 contract with a Florida consulting firm to help it “determine whether the toll revenue generated by the RiverLink bridges is enough to make debt payments on the project’s bonds.” The financing of the widened I-65 crossing (and another beltway freeway crossing several miles to the East) hinges on tolls generating enough revenue to repay the bonds that Kentucky issued to pay for the project. If toll revenues don’t grow fast enough in the years ahead, the state will have to find some other source of funds to make these payments, which could make this particular experiment in transportation behavior a particularly expensive one. Stay tuned!
(Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-posted from City Observatory. It appears here with permission. Traffic images courtesy TRIMARC.)
Conceptual rendering of what Interapt's new Portland headquarters could look like. (Courtesy Pickett Passafiume Architects)
Unless you’ve gone out of your way to explore what lies steps west of the Ninth Street Divide, you may never have seen it. An ancient complex of two-story buildings and weathered brick walls at Rowan and 13th streets carries ghost signs declaring it the Queen Products Company. An older, fainter sign recalls the Louisville Mill Roll Corrugating Company. It’s been hunkered down here by the floodwall for more than 150 years, by some estimates. Its cast-iron-columned facade has weathered floods, storms, tornadoes, and the destructive decay of the 20th century.
The structures were never really vacant—there was just nothing much to see. Until now.
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The buildings have been hunkered behind barren fields and the floodwall for decades. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Aerial view of the Interapt complex. (Courtesy Google)
The complex looking east down Rowan from 13th Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Looking west on Rowan toward 13th Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
The view north along 13th Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Thursday, tech company Interapt announced plans to make the corner its headquarters. Owensboro native Ankur Gopal founded the company in 2009 and serves as its CEO. Interapt plans to invest $3.7 million into its new home, remaking the historic structures with an eye toward history and a foot firmly in the future.
The Interapt team moved into the eastern-most side of the complex at 1226 Rowan Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
The project features a team of usual suspects. Gill Holland is the figurehead behind the Portland Investment Initiative (Pii), which purchased the complex last spring for $925,000. Pii, now in its fourth year, is a 10-year, $24 million campaign to bring new life to the Portland neighborhood. Shine Contracting, headed by Gregg Rochman, works with Pii to renovate its properties. And in turn, Jeff Pickett and Nick Passafiume of Pickett Passafiume Architects help imagine what those plans might look like.
A group of veterans pose in front of the John H. Isert Co., now Interapt’s headquarters, in 1944. Underlaid with a modern view of the building. (Historic image courtesy UL Photo Archives – Reference; Building photo and montage by Broken Sidewalk)
But the big surprise is that Interapt has already moved in. “All 30 to 40 employees are moving in beginning today,” Holland told Broken Sidewalk on a phone call Thursday. “There’s a bunch of desks and people are working already.” Almost half of the complex’s 22,000 square feet was in use as office space by its previous owner, The Baughman Group, making the move easy.
“We came in today,” Aly Goldberg, Interapt’s communications consultant, told Broken Sidewalk Thursday. She said quiet Rowan Street had been a flurry of activity for the company. Friday morning, she will meet with painters at the site.
“This is exciting. There’s so much going on over here, especially in the Portland neighborhood. It’s going to be a great place for a startup.”
But the new digs may take some getting used to. Interapt moved from the Atria building on East Market Street—and the new-construction amenities it offered.
Conceptual rendering of what Interapt’s new Portland headquarters could look like. (Courtesy Pickett Passafiume Architects)
Interapt will grow into the entire complex over time. PPA came up with some ideas and concepts of what the eventual office might look like. And, as you might expect, it looks like a hip startup. Concept plans shown to Broken Sidewalk depict a creative re-imagining of former manufacturing space into an open and airy work environment. Think tall ceilings, skylights, and exposed industrial beams interspersed with colorful additions that make the space pop. Maybe even a slide or a basketball court.
“Ankur has a really cool design for what he wants to do with the building,” Holland said. “If he can pull it off it will be epic.”
Conceptual rendering of what Interapt’s new Portland headquarters could look like. (Courtesy Pickett Passafiume Architects)
The idea right now is to house open office space on the ground floor. A mezzanine connected by a dramatic stairway could lead to common spaces and a rooftop garden. And for a two-story building, this thing has some dramatic views of the Louisville skyline. The team is still hard at work on the final design.
Inside the newer manufacturing spaces of the Interapt complex. (Courtesy Pii)
On the ground, however, the complex is in varied shape. “Part of the building needs a lot of work,” Holland said, noting that some of the roof requires replacing. “Parts of it need a complete redo.” But that gives the team flexibility to reinvent the structures for the 21st century.
And that’s part of the core concept surrounding the transformation of the neighborhood. Within a few blocks of Interapt, Heine Bros. Coffee has set up its new headquarters and roasting operation, soon to be joined by Falls City Brewing Company. A former freight train depot is being reinterpreted into a fashion hub and another industrial space into a center for film. The University of Louisville is moving its MFA program to an old warehouse around the corner and Louisville Visual Arts Association also unveiled plans to transform its humdrum building into a Portland showpiece. And the blocks keep stacking up.
Rendering of the potential future view of Waterfront Park along Rowan Street. (MKSK / Courtesy WDC)
Holland hopes the area can become one of the most pedestrian friendly in the city. He’s currently exploring removing eroding asphalt on some streets to expose historic cobblestones as a traffic calming measure. Eventually, he hopes the building facades can be opened up for retail along the park. The Rowan corridor here is quiet, gray, and disconnected. In the future, it’s likely to be quiet, green, and quite connected.
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The Interapt complex in the 1870s. (Courtesy KYVL)
The Interapt complex and context in the middle of the 20th century. (Courtesy WDC)
The Interapt complex in relation to the new park. (MKSK / Courtesy WDC)
The Interapt complex in relation to the new park. (MKSK / Courtesy WDC)
(MKSK / Courtesy Waterfront Development Corporation)
The area in 1906. (Courtesy KYVL)
The area in 1905. (Courtesy KYVL)
The area in 1892. (Courtesy KYVL)
For Interapt, there’s a long road ahead. The company plans to grow to 250 full time employees—and their renovation plans depend on it. That’s because the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) Thursday announced over $2 million in performance-based corporate tax incentives for Interapt if the company meets its goals. The incentives are part of KEDFA’s Kentucky Business Investment program and the Kentucky Enterprise Initiative Act (KEIA).
“We’ve been working with Interapt for a while,” Holland said, clearly thrilled the project is now public. “We’ve just been waiting for them to get those incentives.”
