Posted January 31, 200916 yr Some examples of how Louisville is doing new residential development. A mix of infill and housing project replacement. Preston Street Infill Preston was pretty much wiped out by urban renewal (which is another story), except for this block, which was wiped out by this new infill development. The neighborhood here is east of downtown, between Market and Main, sort of a low grade industrial/commercial area akin the Warehouse District in Columbus or Dayton’s Webster Station. North of Main was a no mans land of scrap yards and railroad yards on the second bottoms and filled-in course of Beargrass Creek, culminating in bulk terminals along the Ohio. First move was the conversion of an old factory building (formerly railroad freight terminal) into a minor league ballpark. Then the industrial wasteland was replaced by Waterfront Park, which is kicking off some new investment along Main and Market. L-shaped loft building on Preston & Main. This is the Preston façade. Romeo & Juliet balconies are maybe not too functional, but they make the façade visually interesting. Main Street façade has a different material and so the building reads as two. Ground floor retail…on the corner is something called “Blue Mountain Coffee”. Buff colored block has a health spa in the ground floor. Rear of the Preston Street block. I guess the brick tower is the elevator. Across the street is this funky thang. The way this is designed the alumninum and glass walls make it look like the corner is its own building. Sort of a clever optical illusion. The corner balcony detail is nice too. A bit of ref to Sullivan at “turning the corner” the State Street Carson Pierre Scott store perhaps? Down Preston a bit, at the Market Street corner is the Residence Inn. This is a simple façade where the massing and small material details breaks up the form. Ground floor windows here look into the indoor pool, which is a neat way add some visual interest to the ground floor, from a pedestrian perspective. Corner sign detail reminds one of period signage like this one from a long-gone Dayton theatre. Downtown high-rises visible in the distance across the urban renewal fuzz Back to Main Street. Looking across Main down into the second bottom towards Riverfront Park “great lawn”, I-64 elevated expressway and Kennedy Bridge in the distance. Old freight house/minor league ballfield to the right and banal modernist façade to the left (first “new investment” in this area after the ballfield went in). Just for grins, a jazzed up parking garage façade and the saved façade of the German Insurance Company. Dayton’s Kettering Tower in the background, to the left. Housing Project Replacement This was the site of Clarksdale, one of two New Deal era housing projects. This was the “white project” (the “black project”, Beecher Terrace, was west of downtown). Clarksdale was torn down and replaced by a “New Urbanist” development called Liberty Green (a pun as Liberty Street, which runs past the project, used to be called Green Street). The skyscraper in the background with also look like public housing are indeed that. Dosker Manor senior citizens housing. Next door to them is the UofL med school. The gross room where they dissected the cadavers was in plain site (it had nice big windows) which freaked out the oldsters when they looked across the street and saw the med students slicing someone up, so the med school hung big parachutes over the windows. Just a bit of trivia there. Pretty much everything here was the product of urban renewal. The replacement of 19th century Louisville via urban renewal is a story all its own. I sort of like the way the replacement housing here works, close to the street but the towers of Dosker Manor and downtown beyond give a bit of verticle accent. Phoenix Hill Modern Shotguns In roughly the same area but to the east is the Phoenix Hill neighborhood, which despite the name is flat as a board. There has been sporadic infill stuff going on here since the 1980s. An early attempts to do a modernist version of the shotgun house. More recent attempts are a bit more contextual. The lower image, to the left, is the “real thing”. (these were all “camelbacks”) Frankfort Avenue Infill Up out of the Ohio floodplain these are on Frankfort Avenue. The hot “new” area since Bardstown Road is all taken by now. This first is in Clifton, a closer-in area. The building with the metal sash in the foreground in this pix was the first place to undergo “gentrification” in this area, in the very late 1970s or early 1980s, with some sort of co-op gallery and art space. That has since went away and there is just hip retail & gallery space now. The infill building is pretty cool. Its really big compared to the street scale, but they break it up with the brick façade and moving the wall plane to the back a bit (the “white” material is corrugated metal). The balconies look like a lot of fun, too. From a different direction. This isn’t really a “revival” design, but its interesting as a mix of modern and trad style, or massing. The garage entry is, well, there. But they do some attempts at scaling it with that archy thing, and keep the proportion sort of the same as the next door one story store, and put that little wall with window and bars between the two. Just nice attention to detail here. Further east on Frankfort Avenue we are now in Crescent Hill, which underwent residential gentrification starting in the mid 1970s, but not much commercial gentrification until recently. This block originally had a music instrument store and porn theatre, but that was replaced by “Deitrichs” restarurant and now something else. As Frankfort Avenue became more and more desirable due to Bardstown Road overdeveloping it’s become feasible to put in new infill. Like this one (which I think Sherman has already posted?) The curvy brick corner reminds me of a hotel in Marietta who's name escapes me. As with the previous example, another attempt to break up the massing as the midblock section is developed as “second façade”. Here we see more “historic” or “revival” detailing. So, a quick tour of some Louisville infill. For this neighborhood stuff it is really something to see for an old-timer like me as Frankfort Avenue was always pretty nondescript. Little neighborhood retail things, nothing fancy. The side streets were being fixed up due to the back-to-the-city movement that started in the 1970s, but not so much the busy street. Then, bam, coffeeshops, restaurants, bars, boutiques, gallerys…the place just took off. And now this infill stuff. I drive by here with my jaw dropping: "where is this money coming from?!"
January 31, 200916 yr Lafayette Hotel ^ Well done. Kentucky's "big city" looks like it's doing the damn thing! "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
January 31, 200916 yr Liberty Green is actually a pretty 'green' development as well. They have used porous brick pavers for the pull-in parking areas (on-street) -- http://brokensidewalk.com/index.php?p=2778 ^Lodge 820 ^Fleur-de-Lis The Shelby Street apartments (mixed income) is a very approperiate infill project -- http://brokensidewalk.com/index.php?p=2774 Did you check out the ZirMed tower at 9th and Market? It's a fairly tall structure, and rather attractive at that. You can find more infill and news Jeffery at http://brokensidewalk.com/ ... one of my favorite blogs.
January 31, 200916 yr Nice infill and I like the design of their parking garage. We're adding two right next to each other Downtown and they'll look like typical parking garages. No retail either. I'm liking the infill that's going in here and the timely reference to Columbus' Warehouse District. ;D
February 3, 200916 yr i really love the last one, lodge 820. it looks great inside and out (per the l'ville construction thread & RE link). you would almost never know its new construction.
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