Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/669874
48 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 warp for Kentucky jeans and Fincastle fabrics were made. "Te completion of the mill and the Shelby Streetcar Loop…led to an explosion of growth in Schnitzelburg," says Haag, who is 77 and now lives in Okolona with his wife. ("I always tell people I live in Okolona but my home is in Schnitzelburg," he says.) Te Louisville Cotton Mills built many of the houses surrounding the plant for its workers. Photos in the U of L Archives from several years after the turn of the 20th century show the area around Goss Avenue dotted with houses, thick grass, dirt roads and outhouses. For decades, German families — a lot of them Catholic, but Protestants too, like Haag and his family — populated the area. (Te name Germantown often lumps together Schnitzelburg and Paristown, just north of Germantown.) In 1901, Elizabeth Cherry Waltz wrote an article in the Courier-Journal about her trip to Germantown, "far out…not in Louisville at all." Heitzman Bakery got its start in the amalgamated neighborhood in 1891 and for several years stood at the corner of Burnett Avenue and Hickory Street, which is now where Monnik Beer Co. stands. Hauck's Handy Store, its 95-year-old proprietor George Hauck a fxture in the neighborhood today, opened on Goss in 1912. Hauck introduced the World Dainty Championship, a German street-ball game, to the neighborhood in the '70s. Te neighborhood has several other community events, such as the Germantown baseball parade, the Shotgun Festival, history walks (which Haag leads), and a blues festival. Hank Oechslin, known as the "Mayor of Lydia Street," has lived on Lydia since he was born in 1932, right after the roadbed was paved for the frst time. "Manual Stadium was my grandmother's potato farm years ago," he says of the Burnett Avenue football feld. I meet him and his wife Nancy for cofee one morning at the AMVETS Post No. 9, at the corner of Shelby and Forrest streets. "Typically blue- collar, hard-working, beer-drinking neighborhood, if I had to say three things. Sharkey, would you agree?" he says to a man sitting at the bar. "Tat gentleman up there is 90 years old. He's the Mayor of Milton Street." Sylvester "Sharkey" Breit nods and adds "Friendly" to the list. At 83, Oechslin is still dark-haired and sharp. He can remember the day this AMVETS post opened ("June the 30th, 1948") but forgets the name of the new "pizza pie place" on Goss Avenue that always has a long line (Te Post). He wears a denim jacket and overalls, a look you might expect more from one of the dairy farmers generations ago than from an old man who walks his dog to Check's Cafe and keeps an eye on neighborhood businesses and home sales. He and Nancy met in the '70s when he owned Old Hickory Inn on Lydia. She came in one morning looking for Hershey bars to share with her friends during her shift at Kingfsh. "Cute little gal," Hank remembers. "Well, I knew his cook and I had forgotten to go to the grocery before my shift," Nancy says. "Hank comes back and asks me if I wanted a beer. Ten o'clock in the morning. I thought, Who is this idiot? "All the grandkids live in Germantown. Tey move out and move back because they don't like it anywhere else." Hank's brother is 89 and lives in Okolona, where a lot of Germantown folks went when the GE Appliance Park and nearby subdivisions were built in the '50s. Louisville's newer suburban homes enticed many, and Germantown went through a decline. Te mills (Hope, Bradford and Louisville Cotton) that had been economic engines eventually closed, with Louisville Cotton Mills becoming Goss Avenue Antique Mall in the early '80s. Tough a hit-or-miss gem to antique lovers, the mall's shattered windows and unkempt grounds became blights on the neighborhood. Residents often dealt with crime, but for years, Nora Christensen's story was not uncommon for the neighborhood: A young family could aford to at least start out in trusty Germantown. Starting in about 2010, Eiderdown and Four Pegs, both bar-restaurants, and Yesternook, an antique furniture store, opened on Goss, which some call the neighborhood's Main Street. At that time, with home prices barely reaching $100,000, the walkability factor attracted a new wave of young people. Two years ago, Jared Langdon and his boyfriend Kyle Grifth opened JB Cakes, a bakery that features build-your- own cupcakes, on Goss across from Mo's Food Mart. Te rent was "stupid cheap," Langdon says — not even $1,000 a month compared to the $7,000 to $10,000 they could expect to pay along Bardstown Road. Two months after they arrived, local developers Underhill Associates announced that they'd be converting the antique mall into 189 units and calling it the Germantown Mill Lofts. Ann Lorimer had lived in Oldham County for the past 20 years, but once her kids were grown and out of the house, she decided she wanted a fresh start. When she found out the antique mall she had visited many times before was being converted into lofts, she was one of the frst to sign a lease, sight unseen. "I pictured what the lofts would look like and said, 'I'm moving there,'" she says. She sold her house and all her furniture, lived at the Crescent Centre downtown near where she works (as a physician assistant in the heart surgery unit at Kosair) for about six months and waited for her unit to be completed. "I started worrying, like, Oh, gosh, have I made it into something in my mind that it's not going to be?" she says. When she was fnally allowed to pick which unit she wanted, the foor had holes and there was bird poop everywhere, but she says she could picture what it would look like. She especially loved the large master bathroom that's in one of the building's towers. "Tat's what you get when you get frst dibs," the 53-year-old The mills (Hope, Bradford and Louisville Cotton) that had been economic engines eventually closed, with Louisville Cotton Mills becoming Goss Avenue Antique Mall in the early '80s before the present incarnation as the Germantown Mill Lofts.