The collision took place a little before 7:30a.m. on Monday, February 8. The child was taken to Kosair Children’s Hospital with what news reports called “non-life-threatening” injuries.
Details of the incident are scarce, with an average length of only 50 words in the available reports.
WAVE3 noted that a JCPS school bus stop is located at the site of the collision, so the child may have been on his or her way to school.
Both Hill and 13th streets are two-way at this intersection, with bike lanes and a turning lane present on Hill Street. Sidewalks are present at the intersection, but deteriorate quickly in the surrounding industrial areas of the neighborhood.
The speed limit is 35 miles per hour on Hill and 25mph on 13th. Just south of the intersection, 13th drops to 15 miles per hour and speed bumps are present around the Park Hill Houses. Speed limit signs are hard to come by on both streets.
This article will be updated as new information becomes available.
[Editor’s Note: Louisville has made some pretty amazing achievements in its first 238 years—but it’s made a few blunders along the way, too. This week, we’re launching a new contributed mini-series documenting eight of the best and eight of the worst decisions, ideas, or projects that have profoundly affected the city. This list is by no means complete—and you may have strong opinions of your own about what should be on the best or worst lists. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Or check out the complete Best/Worst list here.]
A policy that was intended to improve the quality of life for city-dwellers actually resulted in expediting the social and cultural deterioration of urban Louisville. We’re talking about, of course, the now-infamous urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century.
Above: A figure-ground map of Downtown Louisville circa 1900 and again in 1990.
Large swaths of Louisville’s Downtown were essentially “scrubbed clean” of any existing structures and replaced by acres of asphalt surface parking lots and generic, bland buildings.
The poor were relocated to barracks-style housing west of Ninth Street that lacked any neighborhood appeal and shunned the variety of uses that made cities tick. In case after case, in city after city, these policies of relocation have failed the public good.
Above: Old Walnut Street in its heyday and the same view today. (Courtesy UL Photo Archives; Google)
What once was a thriving, vibrant African American district along West Walnut Street (now Muhammad Ali Boulevard) was bulldozed and leveled creating a canyon that exacerbates Louisville’s so-called Ninth Street Divide. Only the Mammoth Life Building (aka River City Bank) remains, although its distinctive masonry exterior has been hidden by a fake metal facade.
Above: A view looking south from the Glassworks building before urban renewal circa 1926 and the same view after clearance in 1976.
Urban renewal did not spare the Central Business District, either. The area marked in the photo below was razed of almost all its historical buildings except for a few landmarks such as Actors Theater, the Levy Brothers Department Store, and Vincenzo’s restaurant.
One avid proponent of “urban removal” even encouraged bulldozing all of West Main Street from Sixth Street to Ninth Street. What is now one of Louisville’s most desirable urban streetscapes, West Main Street, would have been demolished if this prominent developer had his way. What were these civic leaders thinking from the 1950s thru early 1970s?
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Urban renewal never achieved anything remotely close to its lofty goals. Instead it led to vacant lots, lower property values, and lesser living standards.
One positive, though, is that Louisville is always a bit slow in implementing big projects. We are fortunate that urban renewal ran out of steam in the early ’70s, sparing West Main as well as most of Old Louisville to the south. We have been infilling these ugly scars ever since with parking garages and hotels.
Now 40 years after this blight-producing program ended, Louisville is starting to regain a sense of urban density that it once had over 70 years ago. But there’s a long way to go.
[Editor’s Note: Louisville has made some pretty amazing achievements in its first 238 years—but it’s made a few blunders along the way, too. This week, we’re launching a new contributed mini-series documenting eight of the best and eight of the worst decisions, ideas, or projects that have profoundly affected the city. This list is by no means complete—and you may have strong opinions of your own about what should be on the best or worst lists. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Or check out the complete Best/Worst list here.]
Looking around the city’s old and new neighborhoods, Louisvillians overwhelmingly prefer traditional house designs—decorative trim, gabled roofs, a mixture of brick and stone facades.
These architectural elements line suburban streets throughout Jefferson County. There are a select few residents, though, that prefer something else entirely—a healthy dose of modern design. And there’s incredible variety among the modern houses of Louisville, from simple, box-like architecture, to eclectic design, to others employing sculptural massing and varied geometry.
The Leight House is one of the latter, standing as one of the city’s most forward-thinking modern residences in the Glenview neighborhood.
The Leight House (pronounced ‘Light’), built in 1967–1968, showcases a fascinating composition of shapes and surfaces, angles, rectangles, solids and voids. It’s the product of its passionate artistic owners—Adele and Dr. Leonard Leight—and the skilled team of local architects they asked to design the house.
The Leight House’s light color and triangulated geometry, accentuated by vertical siding, stands in stark contrast to its naturalistic woodland setting. The Louisville Guide compared the house to Edward Larrabee Barnes’ 1965 house for Andrew Rockefeller in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“The vertical, wood-sided Leight House steps down a densely forested hillside, while peaked, ribbed metal roofs bring sunlight to the rooms below,” The Louisville Guidesaid of the Leight House. “Thus the house is a series of clustered volumes that are united by a single horizontal volume. Four primary hoods project above the roofline, the function and scale of each unique to the room below.”
The Leight House’s interior, appropriately enough, dominated by a sense of light. This is a residence designed around the qualities of its interior spaces, giving the dwelling the feeling of being a jewel-like museum.
Inside, a colorful art glass collection that the Leights have assembled over many decades adds visual interest to the rigid geometry. Sunlight fills the house, reflecting off the glistening artwork, floors, walls, and ceilings.
“I remember seeing a house that Marcel Breuer had designed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art,” Adele Leight is quoted as saying in Peter Morrin’s book, The Leight House: The Home and Collections of Leonard and Adele Leight. “It was the first time I saw a modern house. That was 1949.” Two decades later, she had a distinctive modern home of her own.
Jasper Ward’s architectural studio created this residential landmark. Ward was Louisville’s modern design master, and he built bold, innovative structures—and proposed even bolder ideas such as housing on the Big Four Bridge or inside concrete grain silos.
Ward is also noted for his parking garage design, which took an otherwise bland and boring typology and added a distinct layer of design. Those include the Federal Garage at Seventh and Magazine streets; the County Garage at Sixth and Cedar streets; and City Garage (in association with Luckett & Farley) on Sixth near Main streets.
Ward’s studio included a team of talented young architects, where he fostered and encouraged their collaboration. This resulted in many award-winning projects around the city. That collaborative approach took root at the Music School at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where Ward’s associate, Robert Kingsley, is credited with the notable building. The old City Blueprint building (now the Love Boutique) at Second and Jefferson streets is, likewise, a team effort with Fred De Santo acknowledged as the lead designer.
For the Leight House, Ward initially presented a three-story concept that the Leights did not prefer. Then, De Santo made the next attempt, and developed the scheme that ultimately was constructed.
Several books have featured the Leight House, and the Leights are well-known within the artistic community. Louisville is fortunate to have such exceptional patrons of modern art and architecture.
[Editor’s Note: Louisville has made some pretty amazing achievements in its first 238 years—but it’s made a few blunders along the way, too. This week, we’re launching a new contributed mini-series documenting eight of the best and eight of the worst decisions, ideas, or projects that have profoundly affected the city. This list is by no means complete—and you may have strong opinions of your own about what should be on the best or worst lists. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Or check out the complete Best/Worst list here.]
High-tech research complexes with well-paid engineers and office staff is what all cities seek in business recruitment efforts. Who wouldn’t want such a property-value-enhancing development, especially if it was designed by one of the most famous modern architects of the 20th Century?
Well, not the independent city of Anchorage in eastern Jefferson County in the 1950s.
During the mid-1950s, Reynolds Metal Company sought to build a research office park near Anchorage. The company was founded in Louisville in 1919 as the U.S. Foil Company and had a manufacturing plant in the city. It eventually moved its corporate headquarters to New York City in the ’30s. But in 1958, Reynolds was back with a plan for its research park that would employ 2,000 executives and other white-collar employees.
The problem? Anchorage residents would have none of it. In classic NIMBY fashion, they fought tooth-and-nail against this project, even though it was well-planned by acclaimed architect Eero Saarinen.
While it may seem a little bit strange that we’re listing this loss of a suburban campus just days after lamenting companies building headquarters in the suburbs, hear us out. This loss represents more than just the footprint the campus would have had on the built environment. It’s the loss of what such a headquarters as Reynolds would have made on the entire city.
Not to defend the the physical layout and auto-centric nature of such a facility, the historical context in which Saarinen was working saw such a site plan as having more in common with a university campus, arranging a series of low-rise buildings in a completely designed landscape. The architecture would have been beautiful, the urbanism a bad precedent, but the loss of Reynolds is a whole other story.
Saarinen was one of the leading architects of the mid-1900s. A portfolio of his design achievements include the St. Louis Gateway Arch; New York City’s TWA Terminal at JFK Airport; Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C.; IBM Headquarters in Yorktown, NY, on the outskirts of New York City; and Warren Michigan’s General Motors Research Park, just outside Detroit. Nearby Columbus, Indiana, contains several landmark Saarinen buildings: North Christian Church, Irwin Miller House, and the Irwin Bank Headquarters, among others.
Saarinen designed a sprawling campus the placed Modernist blocks in a rolling landscape off Westport Road near where the old Lakeland Asylum (Central State Hospital) once stood.
The site was formally planned with a wide, tree-lined boulevard flanked by a modern office slab tower and a low-slung research structur. The grand axis terminated on a fountain and domed structure that calls to mind a counterpart at GM’s Michigan Technical Center. Backers described the campus as “parklike.”
What was their hangup? Anchorage residents based their opposition around a rallying cry that the project would usher in suburban sprawl next to their idyllic enclave. They claimed that if Reynolds built its headquarters, more growth and construction would follow on its coattails.
Which, to be fair, is true. But it happened without the project, anyway, and Louisville’s sprawl continues today well beyond Anchorage. But back then, Anchorage was surrounded by farmland, and like anyone who moves to the suburbs to live astride rural landscapes, the impulse to keep everyone else out was strong.
Further, residents did not like that the campus contained a fabricating shop as part of the complex, but Reynolds dropped that component of the layout to try and appease the residents. Opponents cited a concern that Saarinen had not even visited the project site before producing a design.
Ironically, William G. Reynolds, an owner of the company, was an Anchorage resident himself.
Noted Courier-Journal urban-affairs columnist Grady Clay called this planning conflict “one of the most controversial zoning debates” he ever covered. Then Louisville Mayor Andrew Broaddus was quoted saying, “This is a bitter disappointment.”
After the battle in Anchorage, Reynolds purchased another 55-acre site at Newburg Road and the Watterson Expressway for a Saarinen-designed campus, but by then it was too late—the company decided to fold its research operations (and 750 executive and white-collar jobs) into another campus in Virginia. Mayor Broaddus even tried to persuade the company to locate its office building Downtown on the waterfront.
Now, some 60 years later, we’re left with the suburban sprawl surrounding scenic Anchorage, but we’re out a major headquarters and a design by one of the 20th century’s greatest architects.
Whatever happened to the Reynolds Aluminum research center? Shunned from Louisville, Reynolds took its high-paying, tax-producing jobs to a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, where the company’s entire headquarters was located before being purchased by Pittsburgh’s Alcoa.
Reynolds switched architects for its Virginia structure, choosing Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill (SOM) instead of Saarinen. That structure is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The company valued architecture in all of its designs, which is evident in its main headquarters and its smaller field offices alike.
[Editor’s Note: This article was cross-posted from engineering firm ARUP’s doggerel blog, covering cities, resiliency, and the future. Follow along with ARUP on Twitter & Facebook.]
Four years ago, Louisville, Kentucky, awoke to an alarming urban trend. This forward-thinking southern city—recently ranked as America’s most livable by the U.S. Conference of Mayors—had landed at the top of a decidedly less welcome list: researchers at Georgia Tech’s Urban Climate Lab reported that Louisville had the most rapidly growing urban heat island in the United States.
Simply put, compared to its outlying rural areas, Louisville’s temperature was soaring. Driven by a variety of factors—few street trees, stagnant air masses, and miles of hot, impervious asphalt and rooftops—Louisville’s heat island was increasing by an average of 1.67°F per decade. That’s almost twice the rate of Phoenix, the next fastest growing urban heat island, and nearly seven times that of New York City.
Most worrisome, excessive heat days in Louisville are expected to triple in the coming decades, bringing with them grave public health impacts for at-risk populations: the elderly, the very young, the chronically ill, the very poor, and the socially isolated.
“Cities really amplify climate change,” said Brian Stone Jr., who directs the Urban Climate Lab and is now working with Louisville to forge what’s been called the most comprehensive urban heat island assessment and management plan in the country. Stone was speaking at a symposium late last year at New York City’s Center for Architecture that tackled an increasingly dire impact of our warming planet: extreme heat.
Taking stock of a silent killer
Rising sea levels are often cited as a climate-induced catastrophe, but heat waves are far deadlier natural disasters— “silent killers,” as a recent American Journal of Preventative Medicine article put it, that leave no traces of destruction in their wake. Indeed, the authors note, extreme heat kills more people in the United States than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined—about 400 people during an average summer.
The dangers of unchecked urban heat are growing. Many cities are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet. As a consequence, the annual number of heat waves is increasing by 20 percent per decade in large U.S. cities. Those extreme heat events carry equally extreme impacts. The 1995 heat wave in Chicago killed more than 700 people, while the heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 caused an astonishing 72,225 deaths.
Such grim statistics are the product of a long-observed phenomenon: cities are warmer than their adjacent rural and suburban regions. Known as the urban heat island effect, this condition can add between 2 and 10°F to a city’s ambient air temperature. Heat islands result from a combination of factors, including loss of vegetative cover, use of impervious materials, waste heat, and urban morphology, all of which boost urban heat levels.
Beyond their human costs in heat-related mortality and illness, heat islands contribute to a host of other urban and environmental ills. As cities warm, so does the use of air-conditioning, in turn boosting peak energy loads that cause more frequent blackouts. On hot summer days, that same cooling demand increases air pollution, as older power plants are pulled online to meet peak demand. And waste heat ejected from buildings to keep them cool goes right back into the city, feeding a vicious heat-island cycle.
Low-tech cooling tactics
So how can we build cities—and a society—more resilient to extreme heat? The good news is that a suite of relatively low-tech measures can make a sizable dent in heat-island impacts: cool roofs, cool pavements, and urban trees.
The first two of these measures, cool roofs and pavements, use lighter-colored surfaces to increase the albedo, or reflective capacity, of the urban environment. On a hot summer day, a typical black roof can be 90°F above ambient air temperature, while a smooth white roof would be just 15°F hotter than the air. In other words, white roofs can cut surface temperatures by 75°F—a remarkable cooling effect. Studies suggest that if cool roofs were adopted across an entire metropolitan area, the cumulative heat island effect could be reduced by as much as 3°F.
Rooftops are the low-hanging fruit for heat-island reduction. Take New York City, where roofs constitute 11.5 percent of the city’s total area—nearly one billion square feet. The city’s code now mandates that new and most replacement roofs be covered with white coatings to reflect light and heat into the atmosphere.
One analysis found that, while cool roofs have a direct impact in cooling the building below them, the aggregate effect is even larger: if many buildings in New York had cool roofs, they would act to cool the entire city, reducing everyone’s cooling loads and providing an annual energy savings of more than $100 million.
Given the large surface area of cities devoted to streets and sidewalks, cool pavements hold similar promise to cut down on urban heat. A Lawrence Berkeley National Lab study found that switching to lighter road surfaces could cut the heat island effect in large urban areas by 1°F.
In cities like New York, where asphalt is commonly used instead of more reflective concrete due to the frequent need to rip up roadways for utility repairs, switching to light-colored aggregate could make a similar heat-island reduction. Unfortunately, such aggregates are markedly more expensive in New York City due to limited local availability, complicating the adoption of this straightforward solution.
Then there are trees: nature’s cooling machines. Meter for meter, trees are the most effective urban cooling tactic. Street trees shade buildings and roads—not to mention pedestrians trudging through the heat—and cool the air through evapotranspiration, generating significant energy savings. Research suggests that a mature tree provides about 3 tons of free cooling as well as a range of ecological benefits, from stormwater absorption to biodiversity.
As these natural air conditioners are replaced with impervious surfaces, the loss of tree canopy is considered a key factor in extreme heat events. Studies suggest that when a city’s impervious surface area passes a threshold of 35 percent, heat island effects follow. (New York City is about 72 percent impervious.) And the most sprawling cities—which are paving over forested areas at more than twice the rate of compact metropolitan regions—have seen extreme heat events increase at more than double the rate of the most compact cities.
How do strategies to reduce these impacts add up? In 2004, New York City’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) compared the cost-effectiveness of each heat-reduction measure. Using back-of-the-envelope calculations that looked solely at energy savings, the agency found that replacing standard roadway aggregate with light-colored aggregate yielded a one-year payback in energy savings. Both white roofs and street trees had a payback period of about 6 years, while more expensive green roofs had a 30-year payback.
Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.
The conclusion? If the city were to embark on a 20-year campaign to plant 500,000 street trees, replace every roof with cool roofs, and resurface roads using lighter-colored aggregate, up to half of the city’s heat island effect could be reversed—with a payback period of roughly 5 years.
Toward the climate-responsive city
While cool surfaces and street trees are a necessary first step, it seems clear that growing public health threats from extreme heat will require far-reaching solutions. Among these are stronger policy frameworks to mandate heat-reducing urban features.
“The most radical thing we could do is implement a landscape ordinance,” said Laurie Kerr, now the director of policy for the Urban Green Council in New York City and formerly the lead researcher for DDC’s work on cool city policies. Kerr pointed out in an interview that New York lacks comprehensive regulations for landscape design that could require a minimum amount of vegetative cover for a particular site.
Other cities, such as Washington, D.C., have implemented a “green area ratio” that sets standards for sustainable landscape design. In Seattle, meanwhile, a points system allows property owners to select from a menu of strategies including green roofs, tree planting, or permeable paving to satisfy the requirement.
Such broad-based strategies, however, haven’t been widely implemented due to a lack of basic research about their impacts and benefits. “In order to really move forward,” Kerr said, “we need to model a range of possible policies and look at the cost-benefit not only in terms of energy but in terms of health impacts.”
That approach is now playing out in Louisville, where Brian Stone and the Urban Climate Lab are working on an urban heat mitigation plan that will make neighborhood-level recommendations to reduce heat mortality through tree planting, white and green roofs, cool paving materials, and other strategies, targeting each one to make the most impact in a particular location. The effort is focused on identifying factors that Louisville agencies can control. “The city wanted us to actually model feasible, land-cover changes that are tied to policy,” Stone told me.
Still other research is needed to better understand how urban morphology—a city’s form and spatial development—contributes to heat island effects. (Intriguingly, Stone noted, some rust belt cities appear to be cooling relative to their surrounding rural areas, partly due to a rebounding urban tree canopy in vacant properties.)
Advances in energy-efficient buildings that use passive cooling strategies to cut energy demand are another piece of the puzzle. And a growing topic of interest is waste heat, the sultry byproduct of air-conditioning units, vehicular traffic, industrial plants, and other infrastructure that drives heat-island growth. Understanding how such systems can be linked together to reuse waste heat instead of dumping it onto city streets is a promising next research frontier.
No solution to extreme heat will succeed without facing another unsettling fact: neighborhoods with the highest temperatures and the least amount of open space and vegetation are also the most economically disadvantaged. In his eye-opening book on Chicago’s 1995 heat wave, sociologist Eric Klinenberg cited “significant associations between disaster mortality and neighborhood poverty, low-quality housing, lack of vegetation, and concentrated urban heat island effects.” Design strategies that boost social resilience, such as compact, walkable cities with high-quality public spaces, are essential to draw people out of their homes, foster social cohesion, and help reduce heat mortality.
Conquering extreme heat is not going to be easy. Globally, 2015 was the hottest year on record. The frequency, duration, and intensity of heat waves are all on the rise worldwide. In cities like New York—where the heat island effect can be as much as 7°F—the combination of rising temperatures and economic inequality makes for a daunting public health challenge.
Looking ahead, Emily Nobel Maxwell, director of the New York City Program for The Nature Conservancy, noted that more research will give us a sharper understanding of heat dynamics in complex urban environments. “We are operating in a world of imperfect information,” she said in an interview. “But we need to be doing things that we know are inherently good in the meantime.”
At a minimum, cooling strategies should be coupled with heat-wave preparedness plans to protect vulnerable populations. In the longer term, creative collaboration at the confluence of science, design, and policy will help us build cooler, greener cities that sequester carbon, capture stormwater, and—most of all—save lives.
Local developer Steve Poe of Poe Companies is partnering with attorney and businessman Tim Mulloy to lead the development team on the $23 million project, reports Chris Otts today at WDRB. The Homewood Suites, an extended-stay hotel under the Hilton banner, would climb eight stories on the prominent corner site owned by Mulloy’s family.
This project is particularly welcome in an stretch of Downtown dominated by streetlife-deadening parking lots and garages. According to Otts, the hotel will forego its own parking, instead opting to partner with the Parking Authority of the River City to fill an underutilized garage around the corner at 120 South SixthStreet.
According to an initial rendering, the new building appears to complete the street wall on Seventh Street between Main and Market. It’s unclear at this point how the Market Street frontage is arranged, as a gap is shown between the hotel and the adjacent Republic Bank building that appears wider than the two-lane entrance to a parking garage.
Horizontal lines shown on the building facade appear to correspond with adjacent building heights in an effort to lend context to the design. We’ll follow up when more design information is available.
The team told Otts that the hotel will cater to businesspeople staying for extended periods in the city or convention-goers in town for a week or more. Each room will have its own kitchen and the hotel will feature an indoor pool, fitness center, and interior courtyard with a fire pit. No word on how many rooms are included or whether retail is part of the plan.
Otts said the project is expected to break ground this summer and could open in late 2017.
The rest of the development team includes REI Real Estate Services and Mulloy’s brothers Pat Mulloy and Mark Mulloy, Otts reported. Indiana-based White Lodging will manage the hotel once it opens.
[Editor’s Note: Louisville has made some pretty amazing achievements in its first 238 years—but it’s made a few blunders along the way, too. This week, we’re launching a new contributed mini-series documenting eight of the best and eight of the worst decisions, ideas, or projects that have profoundly affected the city. This list is by no means complete—and you may have strong opinions of your own about what should be on the best or worst lists. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Or check out the complete Best/Worst list here.]
Louisville’s most picturesque residential street is unquestionably St. James Court. Set within the elegant Victorian Old Louisville neighborhood, St. James Court is an aesthetic delight of distinctive architectural styles centered around a park-like median and a sculptural fountain. All who visit this area would love to live on St. James Court.
The famous street was developed in the early 1890s by the Victorian Land Company, whose president was William Slaughter. Slaughter purchased the land that once was occupied by the Southern Exposition, a major national exhibition that promoted Louisville products and manufacturing in the 1880s.
The Southern Exposition’s expansive display hall covered the entire area bounded by Magnolia Avenue to the north, Fourth Street to the east, Hill Street to the south, and Sixth Street to the west.
Slaughter patterned his residential layout on fashionable English-inspired neighborhood, and hence the reference name of St. James.
All of the resulting house designs were among the best in the city, beginning with the crown jewel, Theophilus Conrad’s mansion at 1402 St. James Court. This Richardsonian Romanesque-style design by the firm of Clarke and Loomis in 1893 is a magnificent structure, both inside and out. The ornamental detailing is superb.
William Dodd, one of the city’s leading architects also lived on this street. So did Alice Hegan Rice, author of Mrs. Wiggs of Cabbage Patch.
The first weekend in October spotlights this beautiful streetscape with the St. James Court Art Show. Artists from around the country set up colorful booths to sell their unique artwork. It is a highlight of the local social scene.
Simply take a stroll along St. James Court—and it’s equally appealing intersecting pedestrian street, Belgravia Court—and you’re sure to have one of the most pleasant visual experiences in all of Louisville.
[Editor’s Note: Louisville has made some pretty amazing achievements in its first 238 years—but it’s made a few blunders along the way, too. This week, we’re launching a new contributed mini-series documenting eight of the best and eight of the worst decisions, ideas, or projects that have profoundly affected the city. This list is by no means complete—and you may have strong opinions of your own about what should be on the best or worst lists. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Or check out the complete Best/Worst list here.]
Churchill Downs is one of the most visible and well-known parts of Louisville’s identity—the racetrack’s iconic Twin Spires of Churchill Downs are recognized around the world. And it’s a thrilling experience to be at the Downs on the first Saturday in May when well over a hundred thousand people stand cheering on the field of twenty in the Run for the Roses.
In short, Churchill Downs and the Twin Spires are intrinsically part of the Louisville fabric. Of what it means to be a Louisvillian, whether you flock to the Downs or stay as far away from the crowds as you can.
For a taste of the Spires’ history, take this excerpt from a 1995 Los Angeles Times article on the centennial of the grandstand’s construction:
The job [to build the new grandstand] went to D.X. Murphy & Brother Inc., a Louisville firm known today as Luckett & Farley, and a 24-year-old draftsman, Joseph D. Baldez. Like any enterprising architect, Baldez wanted to build something special, something that would take the Downs out of the ordinary. The grandstand was hardly memorable. But Baldez wasn’t through.
He came up with the Spires as an afterthought. placing them as ornamental landmarks to add a touch of panache to the roofline. He designed them with slate roofs and open portals, a dramatic, eye-catching addition to Churchill’s profile…
The 1895 Derby attracted a crowd of just 25,000, many of them probably dazzled by Baldez’s new grandstand and the steeples above it that sat on octagonal-shaped bases with portals and arches decorated by the Fleur de Lis, the symbol of the City of Louisville. From the grandstand’s roof to their pointed tops, the spires measured 55 feet.
While the history and legacy is proudly intact, there’s a fly in an otherwise pristine ointment—modern intrusions that weigh down the original Twin Spires’s design. When you take out-of-town guests to the racetrack, often one of their first reactions is: “Why did they do that?”
That refers to the aesthetically insensitive manner in which a massive construction was added like bookends to either side of the spires, the worst of which was built between 2001 and 2005 at a cost of $127 million. There is no design dialogue between the modern addition and the distinctive icons, the corporate logos of Churchill Downs.
Adding to the sense of aesthetic disarray, light poles were erected in front of the spires, which further distract from these distinguished architectural accents.
And while a packed racetrack full of jubilant and well-dressed patrons is a sight to behold, it leaves us wondering, couldn’t design have made this scene even better?
Many a design-minded local or tourist are dismayed as to why Churchill Downs would have allowed this obstructionist aesthetic to be built around the National Historic Landmark site. An addition of faux stucco and bloated proportions stands out against the simple elegance of the historic grandstand like a sore thumb.
This lack of harmony between the original design and its modern counterpart gives the sense that the extreme make-over of Churchill Downs turned the track into a sort of Las Vegas casino with faux-traditional ornamentation that’s only skin deep.
Much of the modern intervention ignores the rich horse racing heritage that other tracks such as Keeneland have worked hard to maintain and enhance.
This isn’t the first time, though, that a design flaw has posed problems at Churchill Downs.
When the grandstand was originally built in 1875, it was located on the east side of the racetrack.
This meant that spectators had to look westward into the afternoon sun to watch the horseraces, with glare distorting the view—a very distracting orientation to say the least for a sport requiring close observation.
Needless to say, the grandstand was relocated to its present site in 1896 to correct this initial design flaw.
“When a group of entrepreneurial bookmakers took over the struggling track in 1894, the first order of business was to construct a new grandstand,” that LA Times article cited up top reads, “one on the west side of the plant, where the setting sun would not interfere with the comfort of the customers.”
While much of the modern Churchill Downs is cemented in place and its flaws eased with time, it’s hopeful to see the track’s most recent additions take a more sensitive design approach—the facility will continue to grow, after all, as the Kentucky Derby rises in popularity.
In recent years, new configurations to the eastern side of the grandstands and improved design on the track’s high-level interior spaces look much better than than the architecture a decade prior.
But for Louisville’s most recognizable piece of architecture and one of its most cherished landmarks, the Twin Spires deserve the best.
A signature building along West Main Street is on the market. Louisville Forward, the city’s economic development department, announced at the end of January that 745 West Main Street, on the corner of Eighth Street, has been listed for sale or lease.
The 29,853-square-foot structure is known as the Alexander Building (or “The Old Alexander Hotel”) and was built around 1880, according to the city. The building rises four floors from Main Street, but as Eighth Street drops off toward the river, another ground floor makes five.
“Metro will entertain all offers and will evaluate based on the best interests of Metro,” a press release read. “All development plans shall be complementary to existing development on West Main Street. Metro does not commit to finalizing any sale or lease based on this availability.” The city said in the release that the site is suitable for office, retail or hotel development.
Two open houses are planned for the property:
Tuesday, February 9 from 4:00–6:00p.m.
Thursday, February 11 from 4:00–6:00p.m.
Private viewings can be arranged by contacting Mark Zoeller at 502-574-0104. To get more information on the listing or to make an offer, contact Cathy Duncan, director of facilities, at cathy.duncan@louisvilleky.gov or (502) 574-4174. Offers and inquiries are due no later than February 29, 2016.
The location couldn’t be better for a top-notch mixed-use conversion. The north side of the structure features sweeping views of the Ohio River, while the corner location ensures there will be plenty of windows and natural light. And who wouldn’t want to wake up looking at the gorgeous Fort Nelson Building across Eighth Street?
Development has been pushing westward along the street for over a decade, and the surrounding blocks are now home to the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, Michter’s Bourbon Distillery, the Sons of the American Revolution, and the Frazier History Museum, among many others.
While West Main Street has dually been branded as Museum Row and Bourbon Row, the area could certainly benefit from a mix 0f additional uses—especially housing—that are lacking in the area. And more retail along the sidewalk never hurts.
What would you like to see fill the Alexander Building? Share your ideas in the comments below.
[Correction: A previous version of this article referred to the Louisville Science Center, which has since changed its name to the Kentucky Science Center. The article has been updated.]