Sherman posted pix of this and I was thinking to myself, “nah, can’t be that good”.  So I went to see it myself.  And guess what, it is that good.  So, something more pleasant that Louisville urban renewal wastelands. 

 

This is a mixed-use building built on a corner site (Shelby and Broadway), with a mix of market rate and affordable housing, in the Phoenix Hill neighborhood.  This neighborhood was the site of a failed gentrification attempt in the late 1970s/early 1980s and is fairly poor, and quite old, but has seen infill stuff on and off in the past.

 

The building is a pretty good design, using historical features and some subtle façade design to fit in the neighborhood and break up the building mass.  A great job of marking the corner with that quasi-turret, too.  Building to the far right (with the green storefront) is “original” .  This is the Broadway side of the building (Broadway is the busy street)

 

 

Moving over to Shelby Street side one can see that this looks like a set of three story row houses.  What’s neat is how they designed the entrance to the apartments and maybe offices in the corner building, by changing materials where the doorway and maybe stairwell is, creating a visual break between the buildings.  Nice touch with the light over the door buzzers.

 

 

The back of the row house side reveals that there are outdoor walkways and entrances on the second floor.  That’s interesting (I don’t know what the floor plans look like).  No covered parking or garages, just a lot.

 

 

And the back of the side facing Broadway.  More attention to detail; they have those scupper boxes draining into a long downspout, which reads as a sort of vestigial cornice.  I’m willing to bet that these are apartments, based on the window arrangement.  The old building to the left is or was a Louisville version of a tenement, with apartments in that L with the monopitch roof (or there used to be), usually accessed by a porch.  A two story version of what you might find in Over The Rhine.

 

 

Back to the Shelby Street facade to show how this feels from the sidewalk.

 

Attention to detail on how they ended the railing, with that little curl.  I like how they create a sort of semi-private zone by making the stair landings a bit longer, extending them in front the of the windows.  The stair and landings hold passersby on the sidewalk back a bit from the building line.  Also, the higher level of the entrances (not flush with the sidewalk) also creates a bit of visual and psychological privacy.

 

 

And the building in context, illustrating how it and its neighbor across the street create a street wall along Broadway, and how the new building marks the corner with that “turret” detailing. 

 

You are looking north on Shelby Street.  Further down the street you can see St Martin of Tours (the greenish steeple), which was built in the very early 1850s, just in time for the Know-Nothing Riots.  The steeple beyond it was for a cloister chapel (this was a heavily Catholic German neighborhood).

 

 

Across the street from the townhouses, old stuff.  The building in the distance with the new wood framing on the roof dates from before 1870.  This neighborhood was substantially built out by the Civil War, but much of that fell victim to urban renewal.  The vast expanses of parking and open sprawlyness that characterize urban renewal space start one block to the west of here..

 

 

Phoenix Hill religious edifices & corner store (the cloister church was a restaurant during the 1970s)(and you have to appreciate the small touches here, like that bay window at the corner store).

 

 

South, across wide, wide Broadway, intersection of Shelby and Broadway.  The real old Louisville, dating from circa 1870s?  Add two or three more stories and you have Cincy.

 

Corrections

 

1.  No Market Rate Housing.  This is all "affordable".  In fact this is all public housing.  The project was developed by Louisville Metro Housing Authority using HOPE IV money and it will be availble to whoever has income levels that qualifies them for public housing.  The backstory is that as part of the agreement to redevelop the massive Clarskdale project (about three or four blocks north and west) the housing authority would provide an equivilant amount of public housing for what was torn down. One of the methods of doing this was this little infill project.

 

22 units (5 2B townhoeses, 1 2B flat and 16 one beds) + 3,000 SF of storefront space. Cost $3.5, mostly funded via HOPE $$$.  Your tax dollars at work (and they did a good job, too, huh?)

 

2.  Front Stoops are Functional, not Decorative.  While the project was being designed the flood contour maps were revised upward after Katrina, bringing the property withing the Beargrass Creek floodway (one of the branches of this urban creek is just a few blocks east).  So the design was revised to raise the ground floor up a bit out of the floodwater, thus the stoops.  This is why there are metal panels on the storefronts, as these are like mini flood gates for the building, keeping the water at bay. 

 

 

 

 

 

Cool!

Phoenix Hill is starting to gentrify and at least become more stable, IMO. There are two large abandoned or severely underutilized 'towers' -- storage warehouses on Logan Street near Spencerian College that were slated to become condos, but the economic downturn put a hold on that. And one of the towers has a fence around the property due to spalding brick :(

 

I do like the infill, though. They have plans for more...

Wow, it's refreshing to see some high quality infill for once.

that is excellent to see at this stage. definately go back again sometime for a followup.

 

i love that double-rehab building third from the bottom.

^

Im not sure thats a rehab yet.  I think its still a board-up? 

 

Also, made some corrections to the original post, which gives a bit of backstory.  This is a very special-case kind of project.