A new tea shop is being prepared for a recently renovated retail space on Bardstown Road. Just a few months ago this space was still under construction with its facade improvement, and now construction crews are busy fitting up the interior. The construction permit lists the interior renovation at around $30,000 for over 1,200 square feet. Any ideas what this new business will be?
A tipster tells us today that the word on the street is the arena has failed it’s first pile stress tests and must be reworked in order to support the superstructure we’re all waiting for. Apparently, the piles are supposed to perform at 250,000 kips (wikipedia knows) so they are tested for double that amount. The test piles on the arena site didn’t quite make it to 500,000 kips, instead failing at 250k (uh oh!).
This really isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Engineers perform tests for just this reason, to detect failures. It does mean the arena’s foundation will have to be slightly modified. The test piles were drilled to a depth of 75 feet, so in order to fix the problem, engineers could order the piles drilled deeper, to say 100 feet, or more piles installed. Each pile cluster might have been around 16 piles, but now each might be 20 or 25 piles.
This shouldn’t delay the project too much, auger cast piles like these can be built quickly. Each pile might take 15 to 20 minutes. Multiply that by 20 per arena column, and there are dozens, and you can see why construction takes so long. Luckily, there are several crews on site that can work on the piles simultaneously. The deeper or additional piles might, however, mean a more expensive foundation budget.
No one’s in trouble here folks, it’s just a pun. The Marseilles of Cherokee Road luxury residential development transforming a former run-down apartment house into six luxury townhomes is still hammering away, literally. We spotted crews today moving debris from the site and hammering something or other on the inside. The big development, however, is glass.
This week, the Louisville Science Center began gutting the ground level of the Alexander Building directly to its west. The museum purchased the four-story limestone and brick building for $2 million last year and plans classrooms and laboratories for science education.
You can see a few interior walls have been removed allowing views to the back of the building and the carpet and ceilings have been stripped. The project should be complete sometime next spring.
This week’s art car isn’t actually a car. And there are two of them. We’d call them art bikes, but according to wikipedia, they aren’t quite that, either. They are, however, two of the most creative modified bikes we’ve seen in Louisville. And today is the Critical Mass bike ride, and Halloween; so it all fits together. The bikes were spotted in front of the J. Gumbo’s restaurant on Baxter Avenue.
Both the bikes and the restaurant were covered in Mardi Gras beads, so we feel they might be somehow connected? You tell us. Louisville has had the whole art car thing down for years, but we haven’t seen much art-bike-decorating-whatever going on in the city. Tell us about an artsy bike or art car you have seen (or send us a photo!) at tips@brokensidewalk.com.
This week, crews have been installing the scaffolding in front of the old limestone whiskey warehouse on West Main Street. The facade is due for a good scrubbing as construction on the new Irish pub, restaurant, and tea room gets under way.
It’s good to see evidence of development progress, especially of a local restaurant, in these tough economic times. Early next year, we can expect to see even more scaffolding on the block as City Properties Group begins work on the adjacent Whiskey Row Lofts. Arena District here we come.
The tiny Roy E. Steele Shoe Repair Shop on Market Street near the corner of Fifth Street is currently in the process of moving around the corner to a new store-front on Fifth. The company is under new management but will keep the long established ‘Roy E. Steele Shoe Repair’ name. The shoe repair machinery was being moved from the old shop to the new space today.
Some of the equipment looks to be quite old yet ingeniously designed for each task involved with fixing shoes. Large, heavy-duty sewing machines, rotating shoe buffers, and the like were all on parade down Market Street.
The new space looks to be slightly smaller than the original, but how much lobby room do you really need for a shoe shop? It’s good to see this place staying put, moving to perhaps a better location that will serve them far into the future. It’s hard to find tenants for the smaller retail spaces in many of Louisville’s old buildings; rather than knock out walls to expand the space, a correctly-sized tenant will help add to the density of service downtown. With all the glitz surrounding the development of glass skyscrapers, million-dollar condos, and posh entertainment districts, it’s easy to forget about the simple cobbler and the basic services he or she provides.
Construction has started in earnest on Presentation Academy’s new $5 million Arts and Athletic Complex on the corner of Fourth Street and Breckinridge Street in the SoBro neighborhood. You might remember from the rendering that the building was designed to blend with the style and building heights of the surrounding neighborhood and represents an increase in square footage and overall mass from the ‘coy-ly’ art-deco 900 Building that was previously on the site. The new building incorporates Romanesque characteristics into its design and as construction of the foundation is progressing rapidly, the footprint of the building is readily discernable.
