The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday launched the Open Prairie Rural Opportunities Fund, which has the potential to invest as much as $100 million into rural food and agricultural businesses with high growth potential, says a USDA press release. It’s the fourth Rural Business Investment Company that USDA has launched since 2014. The fund “will invest in companies with high-growth potential across the food and agribusiness value chain and rural America, including those in the crop protection, agricultural production and processing, precision agriculture, and information and data management sectors.”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that USDA “has invested over $224 billion in loans and grants in rural communities since the beginning of the Obama administration,” Whitney Forman-Cook reports for Agri-Pulse. He said, “What excites me about this particular fund is (that) one of its focuses is on precision agriculture and data management. As we become more sophisticated in agriculture, we need to become more precise, and we need information and data to be collected and analyzed properly.”
[Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-posted from the Rural Blog. Top image of a Kentucky farm by Dewayne Neeley / Flickr.]
The Washington Post has created a map that shows how home values changed, by Zip Code, from 2004 to 2015. Based on data from Black Knight Financial Services, the map “shows how the nation’s housing recovery has exacerbated inequality, leaving behind many Americans of moderate means,” reports the Post. “It also helps explain why the economic recovery feels incomplete, especially in neighborhoods where the value of housing—often the biggest family asset—has recovered little, if at all.”
“While a typical single-family home has gained less than 14 percent in value since 2004, homes in the most expensive neighborhoods have gained 21 percent,” reports the Post. “Regional factors such as the Western energy boom explain some differences, but in many cities the housing market’s arc has deepened disparities between the rich and everyone else, such as in Boston, where gentrifying urban neighborhoods have thrived and far-flung suburbs have fallen behind. Also striking is how minority neighborhoods lag in the recovery. Zip codes where blacks are the largest population group are more than twice as likely as white Zip codes to have homes now worth less than in 2004.”
(Editor’s Note: Locally, Louisville is divided along traditionally racial lines, with steep increases in home value just east of Downtown and steep declines to the west. There is a notable exception in parts of Portland and Russell immediate west of Downtown. No housing data was available for the Downtown area itself. These maps help illustrate the ongoing challenges of breaking down racial and economic barriers in Louisville going forward.)
On the edge of Butchertown, East Main Street bends to become Story Avenue. On this block, a row of sorry looking shotgun houses and boarded up buildings belie the rejuvenation that has been going on in the neighborhood for years.
While someone speeding through might think no more of this block than as an eyesore awaiting its date with the wrecking ball, Andy Blieden saw differently. Blieden is in the middle of a major renovation campaign to save six of those structures along East Main Street and three more on the other side of the block on Wenzel and Washington streets.
The target properties ended up needing more work than McCann was able to put in at the time and he approached Blieden to continue the project. “Bruce Mccann’s a really good guy,” Blieden told Broken Sidewalk. “He had a vision for the properties, and I had the resources. What I’m doing was his idea.”
Whoever thought it up, the simple idea to renovate a half dozen houses into retail space along Main Street is shaping up to be one of the best examples adaptive reuse that celebrates Louisville built heritage since the Wayside properties were redeveloped to create a heart for Nulu. It’s inspiring to see one of the city’s oldest extant sections of urban fabric fortified with cutting edge concepts of preservation economic development. None of the buildings Blieden is working with on the Butcher Block development is historic, yet together they all form a cohesive urban streetscape that’s quickly shaping a real place.
Houses under renovation along East Main Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
In urbanism terms, a block like this represents “incremental urbanism” where each building, in this case a row of houses, grew slowly over time, touched by the hands of multiple people, to become what it is today. In some cases this can be dramatic, like the change along Downtown’s West Main Street over the past two hundred years. Or in this case, more subtle, with the slow accumulation of storefronts, minor changes, or a new building slotted in here or there.
This change happened slowly, fits Louisville’s distinct weird flavor, and, most importantly, provides a canvas on which to redevelop the border between Nulu and Butchertown with growing local businesses. Individually, each building provides an easy target for renovation, requiring less material and capital than building new. Collectively, they form a streetscape that gives Butchertown identity and authenticity. Where a strip mall falls short with dull blandness, working with this kind of incremental growth keeps it interesting. This is preservation at its best.
Blieden paid $675,000 for McCann’s eight-building assemblage and added one more house to make the Butcher Block a nine-building project. In August 2015, Blieden was awarded a $528,200 loan from the city’s METCO program to help “renovate and improve” the East Main Street properties. Blieden told Broken Sidewalk he’s investing well over what he paid for the properties in the renovations, but declined to give a specific project budget.
St. Matthews–based architect Ted Payne, who previously designed the nearby Copper & Kings distillery and the Play nightclub, is designing the project.
“This is exciting,” Blieden said, grinning ear to ear. “How often do you get the chance to take a whole block that’s a mile away from the Central Business District and save it. It’s awesome.” Blieden previously developed the Butchertown Market, renovated a building that once housed The Blind Pig and is now home to Butchertown Grocery, and more recently built the Mellow Mushroom structure on Bardstown Road. “I’m very bullish on Butchertown,” he said.
So far, Blieden’s got a stellar tenant lined up that includes a Vietnamese restaurant, modern home furnishings store, gourmet food shop, an artisanal doughnut proprietor, and maybe even a coffee shop.
Pho Ba Luu Vietnamese Street Food
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
The largest structure at the east end of the strip is today a fast-paced construction site, with saws and hammers resounding through the former mechanic shop. The unassuming concrete block structure, now 75 years old, had been in need of some serious repair. And that’s exactly what it’s getting.
Rendering of the new restaurant. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
Misaligned concrete blocks on the front facade have been leveled up, but that’s about the extent of changes you’ll notice from the sidewalk. “The exterior is not going to be painted,” Blieden said. “Ninety-nine out of 100 tenants would say you have to paint this. It’s been [collecting] patina since 1941.” Hanging from the facade, a neon sign with Vietnamese influences will announce the restaurant entrance. A new garage door, front door, and window will complete the look.
Inside, the space features some original details from the garage contrasted with a new wood-plank ceiling, subway tiles, and an efficient layout that celebrates Vietnamese street food. For more on what’s in store at Pho Ba Luu, check out our exclusive interview with restaurateur Stewart Davis who walked us through the entire renovation. If all goes according to plan, Blieden said the restaurant could be open by the beginning of August.
Food Craft
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Moving west, a shotgun house in the early stages of renovation will eventually be home to Food Craft. “They’re a gourmet food retailer,” Blieden said, “so they’ll have tea and honey and and gourmet gift items.”
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
With the sound of hand sawing in the distance, Blieden walked me through the structure, already stripped of its plaster and lathe but still showing off most of its original details and molding. John Grieshaber, who is handling all the construction at the Butcher Block, said many of those original details will be saved. “We’re going to try to bring it back, as much to its original state as we can,” he said.
Walking upstairs in the camelback house where the store’s office will be located, a small chamfered wall is noticeable at the back corner, a quirk of odd lot lines on the block. “A lot of times, I’ll come in here and think, what? I have lost my mind,” Blieden said. “It’s like building a ship in a bottle.” But it’s clear he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Blieden hopes Food Craft could be open by July.
Stag & Doe / Studio 360
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Next door, a just-complete renovation houses a modern furnishings retailer called Stag & Doe in the front and interior design firm Studio 360 in back, which designed the space. “They’ve been at the Butchertown Market and they outgrew their space,” Blieden said. “They do almost all of our design at the market.”
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
The new location allowed the studio to expand into a retail operation. “The retail portion really comes out of some of our residential clients who are looking for modern home furnishings that are affordable,” Julie Meehan, president of Studio 360, told Broken Sidewalk. “We feel like Louisville doesn’t really have that. We felt like there was a hole in the market.” Stag & Doe will carry a variety of products such as art, rugs, sofas, end tables, lamps, and some gifts like wine openers and cheese plates, she said.
Meehan said she and her three designers hope to hold a grand opening for their new space this June.
Hi-Five Doughnuts
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Louisville’s most ridiculous doughnut truck—Hi-Five Doughnuts—is making the leap into retail space in a shotgun house with a commercial bumpout just west of Stag & Doe. “I hadn’t had their doughnuts for the longest time, and I finally intersected with them. And it was like, oh my god—it was so good,” Blieden quipped. “And I so don’t need it. I have Hi-Five and I have Cellar Door chocolates [as tenants]. It’s just brutal.”
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
And Blieden’s not joking. Hi-Five is known for doughnuts topped with cereal, oreos, large marshmallows, and bacon, among other things. Just check out their Instagram feed. Don’t line up for doughnuts just yet, Blieden said the store is expected to open by December.
First Light Image
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Moving along, the next shotgun house will be a live–work space for photographer Andrew McCawley’s First Light Image. The camelback shotgun house has yet to undergo renovation, but will add to the line-up at the Butcher Block.
“What great tenants, right?” Blieden said. “I have just the most awesome tenants.” He’s clearly excited about how the project is shaping up.
Coffee Shop
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
A tenant for the last house on the East Main Street row is still being finalized, but Blieden said the space will likely become a coffee shop. “I have somebody that’s very interested,” he said. “I think it’s 99 percent sure.”
The largest of the houses, the structure also needs some of the most work. Signs around the back warn to watch for holes in the floor, and walking around the side, layer upon layer of siding is peeling off, giving the effect of a sort of architectural mummy.
Out front, the building also has some strange additions accumulated over time, including a quirky awning between the first and second floor attached to a red concrete block appendage. “I told my guys we’re keeping it because they hate it,” Blieden quipped. A design for the space is still forthcoming. “The idea is to bring it back to the original structure as much as possible,” Blieden said.
The Courtyard
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Just behind the row of structures on East Main Street is the Butcher Block’s hidden surprise—an enormous shared landscape. “This is what’s really important,” Blieden said. “We want this to be a really nice shared courtyard.” The design for the courtyard space is still evolving, but Blieden said it could involve some kind of boardwalk structure connecting all of the businesses.
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Pointing to a pile of stones, Blieden said his crews uncovered the hidden foundation of a structure in the backyard space while doing grading work. “This is hand cut stone,” he said, “so we’re going to use that.” With a canopy from mature trees, once the space is landscaped, it’s sure to be a stunner.
The rest of the site
115–117 North Wenzel Street. (Courtesy Google)
To the north along Washington and Wenzel streets, two more shotgun houses are being converted back to their original housing use. One is already done, complete with solar panels on its roof. Blieden said other buildings would also include similar panels.
Finally, a duplex shotgun (pictured), one of the oldest in the area, today shows off a sagging roof and boarded up windows. Blieden said that building will eventually become office space and the site is currently going through the rezoning process.
[Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Blieden received a METCO loan from Metro Louisville and should not have labeled the loan as forgivable. The article has been updated.
When you walk into the completed Pho Ba Luu restaurant later this year, you’ll notice a fresh combination of old and new architecture. The Vietnamese restaurant, the vision of Stewart Davis and his fiancée Jessica, will occupy a prominent East Main Street site inside a former mechanic’s shop that’s under renovation as part of developer Andy Blieden’s larger Butcher Block project.
While Blieden is keeping the 75-year-old patina of the structure’s concrete blocks exposed, he and Davis aren’t going for a rustic feel to dominate the space. Much of the old garage aesthetic, including an old heater suspended from the ceiling, will shine through in the new design, but there are plenty of modern materials that bring the space up to date. “We’re not trying to do a bunch of reclaimed materials,” Davis said. “The bar’s going to be kind of a reclaimed area, but we didn’t try to go out and find a vintage garage door. We’re not going to go put a potbelly stove in.”
The restaurant’s menu gave inspiration to the space’s design. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
Rather, Davis said the food itself drives the design of the restaurant. “From a design standpoint, we started off with the menu,” Davis said. “And so every single piece is there for a specific reason. It has to do with being efficient with the service.”
Still, Davis knows that good design can enhance the customer experience, including how much visitors enjoy their meals. “We wanted to bring a cool atmosphere, to target a broad range of crowds,” he said, noting that it’s hard to find great design in such a restaurant unless you’re on the coasts. “One of the things we wanted to do with the design was really show that Vietnamese food if fresh—it’s healthy,” Davis said.
Fresh food will be visible along the restaurant’s service line. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
Walking into the space from Main Street, you’re greeted by the service line flanked by seating areas with space for 74 diners. Patrons will place his or her order after walking past fresh vegetables and cooking Pho, the traditional Vietnamese soup. “You don’t order by building your meal,” Davis said, “because it’s a specific menu that took hundreds of years to make.” Rather a menu of food options outlines what’s available. Once an order is placed, customers grab a number and the food is brought out to their table.
The restaurant’s seating plan is designed to be flexible. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
The seating arrangement is designed to be flexible. Banquet seating is placed on one side while another seating area includes a lower ceiling to make it feel distinct from the larger room. “On the audio side, we zoned that a specific zone, so if someone is there having a meeting, we can turn down the volume just there,” Davis said.
Two large garage doors—one in the front facing Main Street and another in the back facing a courtyard—can be opened in warm weather to connect the space with the outdoors. Seating, whether tables or high-top seats, can blend with the activity of Main Street when the doors are open. A bar is at the back of the space next to the other garage door.
Davis is working with Chris Burgin to design the restaurant in house at Louisville-based Axxis, Inc.
A back garage door will open onto a courtyard. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
When asked how he came up with the restaurant concept, Davis quipped, “I didn’t, the Vietnamese did.” But Davis has a very personal connection with the food being served. “My fiancée [Jessica] is Vietnamese,” he said. “So we’ve been looking at it for a few years. She’s from Dallas, and in Dallas, on every corner there’s a pho restaurant.”
In Vietnamese, Ba means Mrs. and Luu is Jessica’s family, so the restaurant Pho Ba Luu translates to Mrs. Luu’s Pho. “These are her mother’s recipes,” Davis said. “It’s all very traditional.”
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
“If you think about it, all these things were prepared on the streets of Vietnam,” Davis said. “It’s like street food. And it’s fast. It’s really made for a fast-casual concept.”
Davis said once the restaurant gets going, more dining options will be introduced. “During lunch it’ll be very fast,” he said. “During dinner, we’re going to morph into a late night, happy hour, and that kind of thing. Then there will more cocktails, runners, and more service.”
Smaller seating areas were introduced to create a more intimate feel. (Courtesy Pho Ba Luu)
“Stewart had great design ideas,” Blieden said. “I was very excited because it was the right fit for the right building at the right time.”
“I’ve worked with so many restaurants, and it’s important that you’re swimming in the same direction. It’s just critical,” Blieden said. “When he got the building, he didn’t come in here and say we need to change this and that. He said, the shell is great and we can utilize it.”
“I looked for about a year and a half for a spot,” Davis said. “Restaurants are hard enough, but dealing with real estate on the front end was almost impossible.” After a friend recommended Blieden, a match was made. “There’s no way we’d be doing this, period, if it wasn’t for Andy’s involvement in it,” Davis said.
(Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
“This building was a catalyst for buying all the buildings,” Blieden said. “I always drove by this building, and I always said, if this building ever comes up for sale… It’s one of the building’s I have always wanted. And I thought it would be perfect for a restaurant.”
“Compared to the Blind Pig, this is a blank slate,” Blieden said.
And as the renovation work is showing, Blieden and team are knocking this one out of the ballpark. “Good design is hard to do,” Blieden said. “Bad design is a large target, good design is a small target. But what I’ve learned is that good design doesn’t cost any more than bad design.”
About a month ago, Broken Sidewalk returned its headquarters to Louisville—and we’re thrilled to be back. While our headquarters has returned, as has long been the case with this publication, there remains a large network of writers and supporters located in Louisville and abroad that help to keep the site going. During my eight years as editor of Broken Sidewalk, personally being able to walk the streets is an invaluable resource to telling the stories of a fine-grained Louisville. And in the past month, our network of writers has been proud to deliver with enhanced coverage of Louisville and the topics that are helping to make our city even better.
But what only a few people close to me have known is that I have been ill in recent months and now have formal diagnosis of Leukemia, which has and will affect how Broken Sidewalk operates this summer and fall. While this illness did not spur my return to Louisville, I’m certainly thankful to be here with my family and loved ones—and you readers—around me for support.
My recovery will be my first priority in upcoming months, but Broken Sidewalk will not be going away. We will still be publishing the stories that matter to Louisville—and there are plenty that have been in the works for quite some time. May is, after all, National Bike Month and National Preservation Month, making this an important coverage period on Broken Sidewalk. Please bear with me through this trying time—I appreciate your support, both personally and for the site.
It’s hard to reduce someone as prolific as Jane Jacobs to a single book. She accomplished so much more than that over her career fighting for better cities—she stopped an elevated highway from crossing Manhattan that would have destroyed large swaths of cast-iron Soho and Washington Square Park. She was instrumental in protesting the demolition of the monumental Penn Station that helped spark the modern preservation movement in New York City. She redefined the notion of how streets work and why people love them.
A 1961 Random House advertisement for Death & Life of Great American Cities. (pdxcityscape / Flickr)
But she also wrote Death & Life of Great American Cities—and that’s also no small achievement. When the hefty tome was published 55 years ago in 1961, it was a full assault on the planning structure of the day that was giving shape to lifeless plazas and parks, faceless skyscrapers, bulldozing entire neighborhoods, forcing highways through thriving neighborhoods, and generally killing off the life of the city.
While many of her views in the 1950s and ’60s were considered radical, they’ve become the norm for urbanism today—mostly. We still fight today many of the same battles that Jane Jacobs fought half a century ago against the same power structures that would remake cities in ways they see fit, without consideration for all the nuances that make cities great. And we’ll likely continue to fight those battles for some time to come.
A Google doodle celebrating Jane Jacobs’s birthday. (Courtesy Google)
But today, the accomplishments of Jane Jacobs deserve special attention. Today is her 100th birthday.
One hundred years ago, May 4, 1916, Jane Butzner was born to a doctor and a nurse in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After moving to New York City in the Great Depression and marrying architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, Jr. in 1944, Jane’s ideas of city life would be indelibly marked by the streets of Greenwich Village, which deviate sharply from the grid of 1811 that defines the rest of Manhattan.
On these human-scaled streets, Jacobs would observe what made the city tick and she would come to figure out why she loved it so much. She moved around on foot and bike—she saw the city first hand at a speed where you could easily make out its details and learn its secrets.
And while it’s doubtful that Jacobs ever saw Louisville first hand, she did know of our city through the correspondence of our own great urbanist, Grady Clay. In 1958, Jacobs wrote a lengthy article published in Fortune magazine called “Downtown is for People,” where she cautioned about careless development that was destroying cities across the country. We wrote about that article here.
“All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come,” Jacobs wrote. “Great tracts, many blocks wide, are being razed.”
She warned that these mega-projects would become lifeless tombstones in the heart of our downtowns: “They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery. And each project will look very much like the next one…no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own.”
“These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it,” Jacobs added. “For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety.”
Instead, she pleaded for us to get out on our own two feet and look around the street for ourselves. “The best place to look at first is the street,” Jacobs said. “The street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and communication. Users of downtown know very well that downtown needs not fewer streets, but more, especially for pedestrians.” It’s no accident that “sidewalk” plays prominently in name of this very publication.
Louisville plays a more direct role in Death & Life. Grady Clay had been corresponding with Jacobs about a thriving shoe market on the edge of Downtown that offered half a million pairs at any time. It had grown up organically, without any help, and was drawing people from distant cities to browse its shoe offerings.
“This is in the inner gray area,” Clay wrote to Jacobs, “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…”
Today, only Pix Shoes at Market and Preston streets remains of the once thriving district. The rest of that part of town is highways and parking lots.
But while Louisville and every other city had to fight its own battles the same time Jane Jacobs was fighting to save New York, her words and high-profile actions helped give credence to the notion that urbanism matters. We now know Jacobs was right about how cities work, and whether we choose to act on her recommendations or not, we’re better off for having them. And we’re thankful that she lived an exemplary life in deed and word.
On the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. (Courtesy PeopleForBikes)
Sorry, I don’t have time to use the car to get there. That’d take too long—I’d better bike instead.
No, I don’t mean “biking saves you money and time is money.” I mean biking actually saves you time.
No, I don’t just mean during rush hour. Sure, everybody knows that in a city during rush hour, bicycles usuallytravelfasterthancars. No, I mean biking is always more time-efficient than driving.
In fact, a study released last year found that riding a bicycle transports you from place to place instantaneously. As in, it takes no time at all.
Stay with me.
Naturally, this study came out of the University of Utrecht. Utrecht is a Dutch city that’s about the size of Wichita, with the minor difference that about half of all trips of five miles or less in the city happen on bicycles. That means that the Utrecht scientists had really good data to analyze. They studied the habits of 50,000 Dutch people, most of whom rode bicycles for various amounts of time each day, over the course of many years.
Utrecht. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland; used with permission)
Here’s what the study found: for every additional 75 minutes a week that you spend on a bike (that is, for every 11 minutes per day) you generally increase your lifespan by six months.
This isn’t super surprising in principle. Virtually every scientific study of what makes us healthy is just a complicated way of saying one of two things that we all already know: (1) don’t eat much junk food and (2) get your heart beating for a little bit each day, the more the better. Maybe that’s why this study didn’t get wall-to-wall coverage when it came out in 2015: it seemed obvious.
But the longer you think about this finding, the more interesting it becomes.
Eleven minutes per day. That’d be 3,906 minutes per year. Over the course of, say, 70 years, it’s 273,385 minutes.
Which comes out to … six months.
Which is exactly the amount of extra lifespan that these scientists discovered that 11 more minutes of biking per day will give you. Which means…
Woah.
Every minute you spend on a bicycle increases your lifespan by one minute.
I don’t know about you, but in my case I know that riding a bicycle also makes me happier. The first day I rode a bike to work, I could feel the endorphins tingling appreciatively in my elbows.
But when I’m deciding whether to go somewhere on a bike, I still find myself weighing that happiness against time. Can I afford those extra 10 minutes? I could spend those 10 minutes writing emails, or finally organizing my desk, or just relaxing with Facebook.
But those things don’t actually make me happy. (OK, having a clean desk does, but we both know I’m not actually going to do that.) And one thing is for sure: those minutes don’t come back.
When you think about it, this study means that any time you spend on a bicycle is literally free time. Every minute you spend is coming back to you. Because bicycling is going to give you back all the time you invested, there’s no net time lost.
Which is why, if you do the math, a bicycle is basically a teleporter.
A teleporter that makes you happy.
Saves you money, too.
Beam me up, Scotty.
[Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-published from PeopleForBikes’s Green Lane Project blog. Follow along with PeopleForBikes on Twitter and Facebook.]
With the Kentucky Derby just a few days away, there are a lot of visitors in our fair city. We locals have ideas about where Louisville’s hotspots are, where the best restaurants are located, or the places worth spending time in. But what about the tourists?
Enter data artist Eric Fischer, who compiled and mapped more geo-tagged tweets than we can imagine using an archive from Gnip, Twitter’s enterprise API platform (dated September 2011 through May 2013). Fischer looked at a user’s recent recent geo-tagged history to make an educated guess about whether specific tweets were from locals (blue) or tourists (red), creating a map called “Locals vs. Tourists” on the Mapbox platform—for the entire world. So we, of course, zoomed in to Louisville.
While the resulting maps were somewhat predictable, there were some surprises. One of the biggest is just how recognizable a map of Louisville is using just tweets. Most of the major streets and interstates in the city are tweeting superhighways. (We can only hope it’s the passengers, not a distracted driver.)
As you might expect, most tourist tweets are centered in Downtown Louisville where thousands of hotel rooms, plenty of attractions, and the convention center have created their own sort of city of strangers within a city of locals. The map here glows bright red. Some of the popular tourist destinations include the Galt House, the convention center, and Fourth Street Live! On the eastern side of the above map, locals clearly dominate the scene along Baxter Avenue and Bardstown Road. Nulu, still just getting its footing back in 2011 when the data was collected is only a blue linear blip.
Moving south, we expected Churchill Downs to be lit up like it was on fire, but it only glows slightly red. Sports facilities at the University of Louisville are strongly blue for local. To the east, the red picks up again at the fairgrounds. Most vividly, though, is the outline of the terminal building at Louisville International Airport, which stands out like a red wishbone. Notably on the local side, Old Louisville, or probably more accurately the University of Louisville, is a Twitter hotspot.
Most of the outlying areas of Louisville are blue for locals, but red tourist tweets again surface at Mall St. Matthews and Oxmoor Center on Shelbyville Road. When the mall’s the only major shopping in town, it appears both locals and tourists will head over and tweet about it. Downtown St. Matthews is solidly blue.
Finally, zooming out to a regional level, take a look at how other cities ranging from St. Louis on the left to Columbus on the right shape up compared to Louisville.
So what can we learn from these maps? On the surface, we can begin to understand how people—both tourists and locals—are using our city. It appears tourists are predominantly sticking to the parts of town designed to be tourist friendly and missing out on some of the best local Louisville has to offer.
Can we do a better job of spreading the word about some of the city’s hidden treasures? Or are they isolated without cars and no transit option with which to get around?
We can also begin to understand where average Louisvillians are going to be social—at least digitally social on Twitter. It’s clear that the malls are dominant features on Louisville’s tweet landscape. Will increasing retail in Downtown or elsewhere help give other areas a boost? Downtown in general could certainly stand a few more tweets to fill in the white space.
In a similar fashion, it would also be fascinating to see these maps updated with modern geo-tagged tweets to give a sense of the social media evolution of place. Downtown and Nulu would likely be much more colorful, and maybe Churchill Downs would stand out a bit stronger than it does here?
What observations do you see in these social media maps of Louisville? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Sitting in the center of the Jacobs neighborhood just west of Churchill Downs is a beautiful old school building designed in the Art Deco style. The Charles D. Jacob Elementary School, 3670 Wheeler Avenue, is actually two structures, an older Mission style structure built in 1912 and the new Deco addition circa 1932 sited next door.
But since 1991 when Jefferson County Public Schools relocated Jacob Elementary to a new, certainly less distinctive structure, the old schoolhouse’s future has been uncertain. Since it was auctioned in 2006, it’s been has been vacant, deteriorating, and attracting vandals.
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In 2014, developers surfaced to restore the structure. A team led by St. Louis–based Bywater Development Group had proposed to convert the building into affordable senior apartments. “The proposed development will provide affordable rents to prospective residents within the market area at proposed rents [that] are well below the adjusted market rent, based on a survey of existing market rate developments,” a 2015 Jacobs neighborhood plan reads.
Project site plan from a 2015 Jacobs neighborhood plan.
The historic rehabilitation would create 56 apartments for people aged 55 years or older, along with common areas, activity spaces, and a library/computer lab. An elevator would be installed and steps at the building entrance would be removed to bring the structure up to ADA standards.
According to a 2014 Courier-Journal report, the school’s classrooms would be converted to studios, and one- and two-bedroom apartments. The gym would be two-story lofts. At the time, rents were projected to range from $395 to $560 per month.
Metro Louisville considers the $11.5 million conversion a priority project, according to that neighborhood plan, and has issued $1.2 million in Metro HOME dollars toward the project. The development is also seeking state tax credits and federal historic tax credits. Community Development Block Grants are also funding site improvement.
But since those plans were announced, little has happened. In 2014, the site was rezoned from R5 single family to R7 multi-family to make to project viable. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
Last month, WDRB’s Gil Corsey looked into the project and teased that additional funding was in the works. “We’ve heard that there will be good forthcoming from the Kentucky Housing Corporation, which will be the award of tax credits toward this project,” Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, chief of Louisville Forward, told Corsey.
It appears that funding has now come through. Today at 2:30p.m., Mayor Greg Fischer and area Councilwoman Marianne Butler will gather at the corner of Wheeler and Camden avenues to announce the project is moving forward.
And rejuvenation of the Jacobs neighborhood couldn’t come sooner. As Corsey reported, there have been four murders in the area in the first four months this year. Seeing a neighborhood eyesore renovated and restored could be just the boost of confidence that Jacobs needs.
