There’s another vacant retail spot downtown. This time, Lynn Imaging has abandoned its location at Seventh Street and Market Street in favor of the Bluegrass Industrial Park. The retail outlet was in one of those hard-to-lease parking garages, so don’t expect to see something else move in soon. Unless the garage is in an extremely high-pedestrian-traffic area like adjacent to the convention center (this one’s not) or you have an institution ready to take the space for cheap (see the Cressman Center), garage retail in Louisville has proven stagnant even in good economic times.
The giant crater we lovingly call the arena site is getting bigger and bigger with every dump truck driving off the dirt field. We stopped by today to see just how big a mess we’re talking about, and it is getting huge. A wooden shoring wall along main street grows board by board as excavation for a three-story underground parking garage takes place. Other crews were breaking up the last remainders of the old Humana building and the electric substation.
Tunnel To The Ohio River. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
One of the massive tunnels from the substation (visible in the picture above) leading to the Ohio River has been carefully barricaded off. Several of these shafts are on the site and present an interesting engineering problem for building a 22,000 seat building on top. Still other crews were testing concrete auger-cast piles with a fancy contraption and sensitive monitoring devices to see if the thing will actually stand up to the weight of such a large toaster.
In other arena news, an engineering firm known for their work on the McAlpine locks and the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indy was hired to test construction materials like those piles. Some big convention and athletic activities are also being planned for the new facility including a few potential NCAA final four events. This step is crucial as these events pay the bills on the $238 million mortgage. The general contractor told the Arena Authority today to expect steel rising from the site within 11 months. Most exciting, perhaps, is a fancy new countdown clock on the Arena Authority web site, ticking down the seconds until the ribbon cutting. As of this writing, there are 734 days, 3 hours, 49 minutes, and 43, 42, 41… seconds. They also have a webcam of the crater, err arena site if you want 24-hour live footage.
The Presidential Place Condos in Butchertown on the corner of Washington Street and Adams Street are billed as high luxury and are now 33 percent sold out. The development has three units, so if we do the math… yes, there are two more available units for sale. The smaller of the two features 2,200 square feet and is listed at just under $400,000 and the larger has 5,000 square feet for around $800,000.
Presidential Place Condominiums. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was originally the William Gnau Home & Residence. The building was built in 1876 and is typical of mixed-use commercial architecture of the period. The renovation into the Presidential Place in 2007 added modern amenities such as an elevator, keyless entry, private courtyards, spas, new fireplaces, and solariums.
The building was previously home to the E.S. Tichenor Interior Design Company (their sign is still visible on the south side of the building). Now the structure is zoned entirely residential, meaning the original retail space is legally unable to be used as retail. It is a possibility, perhaps, that an interested buyer could attain a spot zoning variance for the first floor condo and use it as retail. It’s good to see the building restored as these austere 19th century commercial buildings are some of out favorites.
Presidential Place Condominiums. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
New Albany Put Up For Sale. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
New Albany has been put up for sale. All of it. Every last building must go. Okay, so that’s obviously an exaggeration, but walking around the New Albany downtown, it does seem that every other building has a for sale sign on it. So these photos aren’t hot off the presses. They were taken just before the Harvest Homecoming on October 8th, but the fact that New Albany is for sale is still a current topic. A New Albanian told us that this “for-sale-phenomenon” is in part due to the Harvest Homecoming and the thousands of visitors that will flock the streets of the city center. Eager property owners are out to make a buck, and the prospective buyer has quite a selection to choose from.
One of the more distinctive street signs in Louisville has up and vanished. The sign is located near the corner of Ninth Street and West Main Street and is hanging on the Kentucky Mirror & Plate Glass building. The sign began its life with the Progress Paint Manufacturing Company but sometime last year got a complete makeover, trading its cartoon persona for a real life portrait and its paint placard for a real life mirror. It seems now that the sign was a little too realistic as it appears to have jumped off the building and run away. Keep your eyes peeled for a plastic man in overalls running downtown with a mirror.
Workers have been installing the new sidewalks in front of the Waterfront Plaza towers on Main Street for a little while now, and there’s enough of the new tri-color pattern in place to get a good look at the design. The paving idea was born of several meetings hosted by Harvard urban design professor Alex Krieger. We were at those community meetings and can tell you that a lot of good ideas came out of them, only to be ignored by the Arena Authority. One such example was ideas about integration of such a large facility into the community fabric and the danger of the ‘iconic’ design appeal which were largely ignored in the final design. It was a good community exercise, though.
New Brick Sidewalks on Main Street. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
So, these sidewalks evidently came out of the meeting (we don’t remember that part of it), and they are a drastic improvement over the red tiles installed years and years ago. The old pavers were prone to be slippery wet or dry. The new pattern incorporates half-bricks set in mortar (kinda like the ones in front of the National City Tower, or should we say PNC Tower II) with a random pattern.
The overall design is more playful than anything else in Louisville; probably one of the nicest sidewalk paving designs in the city. However, the colors are really quite bland and the overall scheme is still very tame. Dark grey, beige, and light beige just seem, well, boring. The design is still very elegant and the light and dark contrast still proves interesting, especially as it gains density and formality near the street’s edge, but something something more could have made the effect better.
Perhaps this pattern could have been placed at the edges of the district and as one approached the arena, the pattern and material gained intricacy and complexity, color and utter unexpectedness. By the time you were at the arena itself, the paving would be off the wall, but still cohesive. The overall scheme could have been as ripples expanding from the arena plaza itself, slowly normalizing and becoming part of the rest of the city.
The new paving system will eventually stretch all the way to Sixth Street and will feature new decorative lighting. New granite curbs are also being installed as part of the project (the wide ones like on West Main, not the skinny ones like on Sixth) and the streetscape should, in fact, help to connect the area under one identity. The improvements cost the city $180,000 and will be complete before the arena opens.
The past year or so has witnessed the addition of several new dining options to the downtown central business district. Some of the new stars include the Manhattan Grill in the Republic Building on 5th Street and Muhammad Ali Blvd., the Jimmy John’s sandwich shop on Jefferson Street between 4th and 5th Streets, the Dooley’s Bagels in the Henry Clay on 3rd Street, and the Wolfgang Puck Express on the corner of 3rd Street and Market Street.
Hot off the panini grill (as it were), Panera Breads has just opened on 4th Street in the Aegon Center Plaza. We stopped in today to see how business was doing, and whoa, we could barely get through the front door. Were it not raining and cold, the tables outside would have been packed as well. The line was a couple dozen deep (or so it seemed), and the restaurant space is deceivingly large, stretching north all the way to the Aegon Tower itself. Nearly every table in the place was occupied, so we snapped a photo and left.
Einstein Bagels Will Be Right Here. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
Moving down 4th Street, we finally looked beyond those visit Ireland, it’s beautiful posters on the Hyatt Regency and noticed the Einstein Bros. Bagels ‘Coming Soon’ sign. The bagel shop is slated to open the second week of November, and judging by the interior construction work, they better keep moving! Hopefully (but sadly not likely), they will replace a few of the windows on the Hyatt plaza side with doors that could open to outdoor seating in the generally barren spot in front of the hotel.
Finally, we wrapped up our tour-de-downtown-food at the 4th Street Live food court, where Yum Brands will open a KFC-Taco Bell combo station. Not as exciting, yes, but still it will be the only KFC downtown in Kentucky’s largest city… now that’s kinda something? While a food court stall is slightly underwhelming, we’ve been pushing an international flagship KFC downtown. Something along the lines of those Asian mega-stores that’s huge (more than one floor) and open late, or better yet, all the time. Give us the KFC of KFCs where when Derby guests come to town, we can point and say, “That’s THE Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
Overall, the lunchtime (and to an extent dinner) food options downtown are improving dramatically. With the number of options now available, it would be a good time to live downtown and walk to the variety of eateries (ok, they are mostly chains, we know, but more options are better for now, right?). That means we need more people living downtown, which means we need more CBD housing, which means we need the economic crisis to end, which means we’ll be waiting a while. Hopefully the downtown workforce and tourist population can keep these businesses flourishing until then.
Future Site of KFC & Taco Bell. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)
P.S. The Z’s Fusion restaurant is supposed to open next month on the corner of 4th and Market Streets and (big surprise) the 7th Street Manhattan Grill location has closed, so the only spot now is on 5th Street. Oh, and we asked the local 4th Street Live folks about the McCormick & Schmick’s upscale seafood restaurant once planned for the Starks Building, but they just stared back with blank expressions. No deal was ever formally signed, so we’ll see if this one still managed to get through.
