OldLouisville.com
Louisville
After the Bombings?
This section is not about Old Louisville. It is about old Louisville.
To be sure, Louisville was never bombed. At least not from the air, or in any other military sort of way. Yet, so few remnants remain of the late19th and early 20th century city, frequently admired by visitors and writers a century ago, it could easily be suspected that Louisville suffered the same fate of aerial bombardment as so many European cities during the the Second World War.
We have put together a group of images to show some of Louisville's earlier and grander landmarks in the process of their destruction. Although these pictures were taken over several decades (the 1940s through 1970s), as a group they look like images of the aftermath of war. We use these pictures as a starting point for a history of the development of the respective sites. While these images are not of the Old Louisville Historic District, a district that could have been double or triple its present size if the value of the area could have been recognized 30 years earlier, they do serve to illustrate the perilous path our Victorian and post-Victorian heritage has taken through the latter part of this century. But for a few determined and dedicated residents of Old Louisville during the 1960s and 1970s, even America's largest Victorian neighborhood might not be here today.
Victorian and post-Victorian Louisvillians left behind solid and elaborate structures that were built to last for generations. These Louisvillians were fiercely proud of their city. Usually no expense was spared in building on a grand scale with expensive materials and decoration. These people, our ancestors, obviously had no expectation that within a lifetime the majority of their proud legacy would be carelessly discarded. A walk or drive along Broadway from Preston Street to 11th Street, taking note of the very few remaining Victorian era buildings, still gives some idea of the grandeur of the public and residential architecture that once lined the entire avenue. Of what remains, the former Presbyterian Theological Seminary, now Jefferson Community College, and Union Station, had no easy time surviving to the end of the 20th Century.
Older Louisvillians may still remember the Louisville of 1950, the12th largest and one of the most important cities in the United States. In those days Louisville was home to scores of large manufacturing industries, tobacco processing, the worlds largest distilleries, a thriving commercial and cultural downtown core, and some of the finest public and residential architecture to be found anywhere in the hemisphere.
This situation changed rather suddenly. Within 20 years, a number of measures were already being employed to try to revive a faltering downtown, sometimes with exactly the opposite effect as intended. A number of official and semi-official reasons are often cited to explain the decline of the central city, including (but not limited to) and not necessarily in order of importance:
- popularity of the automobile and good roads This combination removed the transportation need and advantage of living downtown. People could easily and quickly commute to work from the suburbs. This was also a factor that helped caused the loss of the excellent frequent and reliable public transportation essential to a great city. The metro area became geographically too large to support it.
- political myopia, especially in the 1950s-1970s. Reynolds invented aluminum foil in Louisville, Seagrams had the worlds' largest distillery here, and American Standard made most of the bathroom fixtures for the country. Taxation policies along with various political and labor disputes drove these and many other industries from the city.
- zoning While it makes sense to enact laws that protect residential areas from the encroachment of heavy industry, warehouses and the like, it doesn't seem so logical to make it necessarily illegal for people to live where they work and shop and seek entertainment. There were several attractive Victorian corner commercial structures in Old Louisville that could not be used for shops or restaurants (nor residences, thus are boarded up), because the area had been "down-zoned." It's not universal, however, because of "grandfathering." (Just marvel at some some of our trendy check-cashing parlors.) Cities first developed to centralize living for the convenience of all. From home, shopping was nearly always within walking distance, as well as employment. Sometimes, a person could live in the upper floor of a commercial building, have a workshop or do light manufacturing in the rear, and a had storefront to sell the product. The disruption of this balance by arbitrary and poorly thought out zoning laws eliminated the advantages of city life.
- fear of crime A fear of crime, probably more than crime itself, caused a substantial number of people to flee the center city. Largely racially motivated ("white-flight"), what most found is that crime followed the expansion to the suburbs. Crime has always been in our midst, crosses racial lines, and suburbia isn't the solution. As a paradox, downtown Louisville now has one of the lowest crime rates of the metropolitan area.
- fragmentation Specific for Louisville and a few other metro-area hold-outs across the United States. "Louisville" was made up of over 120 "cities" in Jefferson County - Central Louisville itself contained only about a third of the metro area population. This decentralization of the city, with its urban sprawl, repetitions of suburban malls and shopping centers, all containing essentially the same groups of stores, deprived the entire population of the truly unique and marvelous centralized choices in shopping and services taken for granted in the world's great cities. Many attempts at merger had been made in the past to no avail. Merger did finally happen in 2003, but there is still a bureaucratic nightmare of multiple city governments within the county, with their various taxations, laws and ordinances, multiple police forces, fire departments, and service organizations which stifle the efficiency of the metropolitan administrative unit.
- a trend toward downtown vertical construction (office towers) and the enormous amount of parking space they require. As it became trendy to build skyscrapers, there was a need for more and more surface parking lots to accommodate the burgeoning number of automobiles coming to the city from the suburban enclaves. These parking lots were built at the expense of some very fine old buildings. Few saw any need or desire to spend the extra money for multi-level parking. The end result is that Louisville now has plenty of parking lots, but for most city residents, few reasons park.
- a general notion that developed during the last few decades that "old" is somehow not fashionable. "Urban renewal" was the buzz word of the 70s. "Less is more." No one considered (and few do now) the economics of aesthetics. Beauty sells. Those "unfashionable" old buildings that were razed for the sleek new parking lots, motels, hamburger joints, and glass and steel skyscrapers, incorporated the the tried and true and long appreciated architectural styles of several millennia. They were replaced by what is essentially now recognized to be fad construction. The "International Style" of modular glass and steel construction, with all of its initial praise, is now being reevaluated. It is no longer a novelty. The old Louisville of magnificent Victorian buildings was a thriving, bustling center of a great city. The improvements have left us with a ghost town for the most part, essentially a nine-to-five legal-medical-financial industrial park.
Maybe we're sticking our neck out a little, but we'd also like to suggest that much of the decline of Louisville may be attributed to a very few reaping the benefits of the short-term bottom line.
"What in the hell are we going to do with all these old buildings? ....
You've heard about the new bomb. The one that kills the people and and saves the buildings?
It's called the historic bomb."The quote made during the 1970s is from one of Louisville's major "developers" in addressing what seemed to him the excessive interest in historic preservation in the city of Louisville. Now, seeing the fatal outcome of that philosophy, we wonder if he still feels as strongly that the right path was taken. Certainly, few could take exception if that were the case.
Louisville After the Bombings?
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The Old
Post Office |
The 2nd
Presbyterian Church
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The
Warren Memorial Church |
The
National Theater
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The
Masonic Temple |
The
Rialto |
The
Columbia Building
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The
Washington Building |
Clear-cutting
the city |
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ALL HOPE IS NOT LOST
After nearly complete destruction in February 1945 at the end of World War II, see what
can
be done to rebuild a historic city center.
Click here to see
absolutely amazing photos of the ongoing reconstruction of Dresden
(...reconstruction begun in 2002, and what has Louisville done in that time??)
Dresden 1980s
<<nearly same view>>
Dresden 2000s
(By the way, although begun as a public project to restore a
world heritage site,
the reconstruction of Dresden has now gotten far enough along that the real
estate values have skyrocketed.
Remaining un-reconstructed parcels are going for around $6000 per square yard
just for the right to rebuild
historically faithful reproductions of former buildings ...including a
palace...on the site.
check this out)
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