That’s right. It’s time for the second Broken Sidewalk giveaway contest. The Walden Theatre will be presenting My So-Called So-Called Life at the MeX Theater in the Kentucky Center beginning next Thursday and we want to give you tickets to the event.
The Cabbage Patch Settlement House just south of Central Park on 6th Street in Old Louisville has dug itself into a hole. An extensive $7 million renovation and addition to the campus is currently under construction at the facility, but you’d hardly know it from the sidewalk. The new buildings are all sited behind the historic houses and gym that make up the Cabbage Patch complex.
The project includes doubling the current educational space with two new classrooms, a new kitchen, and expanded game rooms and meeting rooms to allow programmed activities to be help concurrently. Currently, there are major scheduling conflicts between activities like the drama club, chess club, and arts & crafts. A large Community Room and Fellowship Hall will further create space on the campus.
Plans also call for the renovation of existing facilities. Already, repair work has begun on the houses fronting 6th Street and one has been repainted. The original 1920s gymnasium will undergo a substantial upgrade and handicap accessibility concerns will be addressed in all buildings. A new landscaping plan is also being developed.
The new design reflects the historic quality of the neighborhood. Careful attention was paid to the scale of the project and new buildings were all designed with their future lifespan in mind. The entire campus has been laid out so it could potentially return to residential use at some point in the future, although the Cabbage Patch has no plans for moving any time soon. We appreciate how the new buildings along the alley will take on the form of the traditional carriage house and help define a well-proportioned enclosed courtyard for children’s play.
Campus improvements are coming in preparation for the organization’s 100th Anniversary in 2010. The Cabbage Patch was originally founded three blocks west on 9th Street, but the organization has been located at their current home since the late 1920s. The project was designed by K. Norman Berry Architects of West Main Street and is expected to be finished this fall.
With site work about done and actual construction expected to begin next month on the CentrePointe tower in Lexington, could it mean the end for Louisville’s long held title as the city with Kentucky’s tallest building? Lexington’s $250 million, 35-story tower will face competition only from the Aegon Center in Louisville, and while it’s scheduled to top out at about 445 feet tall, about 100 feet below the top of Aegon’s dome, developers are including an antenna of undisclosed height atop the tower that may take the title on a technicality. We’re also unsure if the 60-some foot spire is included in the overall height, but it probably is.
The CentrePointe project will be racking up a number of other titles, though. It’s slated to be LEED certified, making it Kentucky largest/tallest LEED building and will house Kentucky’s highest residence, a panoramic penthouse on the top floors. It also managed to grab the most destructive title, knocking down the most historic buildings in recent memory (14) for a mega-development. The best Museum Plaza could do was 4, and we still have facades standing. Center City and the Iron Quarter are looking like contenders, but even they will fall short. Sadly, it will garner yet another title: first mega-project to feature a jumbotron (though our arena will likely be finished before the CP, score one for us).
Museum Plaza could change all of this, though. We figure the main mistake with Louisville’s poster-child-development was that it should have followed the financing methods of CentrePointe: find filthy-rich, unnamed foreign investors to put up cash for the project (they’ve got a 30-year TIF, too). While the Aegon Center’s dome will likely inch taller than the finished CentrePointe, its becoming clear that if Louisville wants to retain the coveted tallest title, we’re going to have to act fast. CentrePointe will contain retail and restaurants, offices, luxury condos, an entertainment venue and a J.W. Marriott hotel. The target opening date is in 2010 for the FEI World Equestrian Games.
The already heated battle between neighbors in SoBro and Old Louisville and the City over the closing of Station 7 on 6th Street just south of York Street has now landed in court. The LEO, which has been covering the story in depth so far, broke the lawsuit story on their FatLip blog:
Yesterday afternoon, Old Louisville residents filed a class-action lawsuit against Metro Louisville and Mayor Jerry Abramson in an attempt to save the Engine No. 7 fire station, which is slated to close tomorrow.
The lawsuit—filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court—asks that a judge issue a temporary injunction to stop the city from shutting down the firehouse as planned. Ultimately, the suit seeks to keep the station open until “appropriate alternative fire service is available.”
The station was built in 1871 and has been operating for 138 years. A black bow was tied to the front of the building which is scheduled to close tomorrow. The city expects to save around $500,000 by closing Station 7.
Transportation Issues
It’s been a while since this was announced, so we decided to round up the talk across the internet about the incoming Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, to see what urban enthusiasts and progressive transportation gurus are thinking about Obama’s choice of cabinet leader.
Bike Portland blog starts us off:
LaHood is a long-time friend of Obama and has worked closely in the past with Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel…
LaHood’s transportation record is mixed. He is certainly not as progressive as a Sadik-Khan or Blumenauer (an understatement), but he has supported stronger fuel standards for cars and has put political weight behind continued funding of Amtrak.
A quick read of some comments on various articles about this news shows a range of reactions, from downright anger to a “let’s wait-and-see what he does” tone.
So there doesn’t seem to be any extreme optimism, but generally a tone of maybe it could be okay. The Greater Greater Washington blog pays closer attention to the words of Obama and LaHood in trying to determine where this choice could lead:
In accepting the nomination, LaHood added, “As a nation, we need to continue to be the world leader in infrastructure development, Amtrak, mass transit, light rail, air travel, and our roads and bridges all play a vital role in our economy and our well-being as a nation.” On the other hand, he later called the federal transportation spending bill the “Highway Bill”
LaHood has a proven track record as a bike advocate but also has close ties to the highway lobby. Most seem to agree that any major transportation reform will be slow in coming as evidenced by the appointment. Here’s a note from StreetsBlog:
As President George W. Bush did before him, Obama has chosen to use the transportation secretary slot as a place to show bipartisanship. “This sends the message that the transportation secretary is a throw-away political appointment who doesn’t matter,’ said a city transportation official who, like others, asked to remain anonymous to preserve their relationship with the U.S. DOT. “This is the slot for the token Republican. It’s the bottom of the barrel. A bone you can throw.”
There’s a little more reading on Ray over at Time. Transportation is one of the most important aspects of city life, sustainability, and quality of life. We hope to see a more well rounded outlook toward transportation emerge in the upcoming years, and that specifically means transit. It’s good that so many people are beginning to talk about the subject regularly and it seems to be in the news more than ever, but can Louisville find a seat at the table? So what do you think about Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation and what goals in policy and in the stimulus would you like to see emerge out of the new administration?
Louisville made it into another ranking recently, although this time it’s a bit of bad news. The Mill Creek Station coal power plant in far southwest Jefferson County was listed among the top 50 worst sites for toxic chemicals stored in open lagoons. These toxic lakes contain such niceties as arsenic, chromium, lead, nickel, selenium, and thallium.
The report called Disaster In Waiting was issued by the Environmental Integrity Project and used reports issued by LG&E to determine levels of the chemicals. You might remember less than a month ago, what might have been the nation’s worst environmental disaster just outside Knoxville when an ash pond dam broke and sent the sludge stew barreling through the environment. Here’s a little bit from the Herald-Leader who reported the study:
“We wanted to know are there other sites around the country that posed a similar risk,” said Eric Schaeffer, director of the project, an environmental advocacy group founded by former EPA enforcement attorneys.
The risk, he said, could come from catastrophic dam failures such as the one in Tennessee, or from chemicals seeping into groundwater.
Chris Whelan, a spokeswoman for LG&E and its subsidiary, KU, said her company’s plants were on the top 50 list because they are large plants that burn a lot of coal.
“These plants are among the top 50 in the country, so the more ash we produce, the more likely we’re going to be on those reports,” she said.
The Mill Creek Station was built in 1972 and burns 3.7 million tons of coal per year (and to think, Louisville has a soot problem). The plant is now fully scrubbed resulting in the manufacture of a lot of gypsum board, commonly used in drywall for new construction. The net summer capacity is listed as 1,470,000 kilowatts and is LG&E’s largest plant. The coal plant ranked anywhere from 11th worst to 32nd worst depending on the chemical in question. You can download the report (including some nasty health problems caused by each chemical) from the EIP’s web site.
The buildings in New Albany have gone anthropomorphic, or so say the folks over at NA Confidential. We think someone seriously needs to make some large bushy eyebrows and find a glue gun: “I’ve been trying for weeks to explain the vision that keeps coming to me when I look across the parking lot from the future Bank Street Brewhouse to the newly remodeled and admirably re-humanized building that now houses the Schad, Palmer & Schad law firm. It’s those two new windows on the side facing west that do it to me every time.” (via NA Confidential, photo by NAC, too)
