Louisville Magazine

OCT 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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Cynthia's. In the meantime, the waitstaf of both restaurants vie to bring Phoebe water and attention. Have I mentioned what a friendly town this is? And accommodating? We decide to wander around the downtown, passing a big storefront church devoted to motorcyclists, and end up on the Ohio River shore listening to a rock band performing for an audience on lawn chairs and blankets. Later, we walk the length of Paducah's foodwall, along the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. It is probably the most interesting — if not the only interesting — foodwall ever built. It's covered with murals. I thought I hated murals after seeing so many sloppy "let's all get along" messages on urban concrete or desperately ugly paeans to the nation's founders. But Paducah's murals, From super to duper (clockwise from top left): avid Superman Festival participants in Metropolis, Ill.; a Hickman, Ky., streetscape; a muralized vestige of Mark Twain in Hickman; and Mrs. McLovet's Cupcakes in Princeton, Ky., just off the Western Kentucky Parkway. 34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 10.13 created by Daford Muralists of Louisiana, are pretty wonderful: Tink of them as 54 hand-painted postcards commemorating things like a Boy Scout jamboree, the 1937 food, the winter the Ohio River froze completely. Tey say something about the town without resorting to sentiment or bromide. Paducah's approach to downtown restoration is simply inspiring. In the mid-1990s, it spent $1.5 million to buy the block that today is the center of its business district, and then gave the properties away to people with business plans and the ability to carry them out. Te result: $10 million in private investment, says Steve Doolittle, the city's downtown development director. Tis is where the restaurants are, and galleries, and Kirchhof's Bakery and Deli. (If you're on a diet, the typography of the business's metallic sign is still sweet to see.) Te city launched a similarly ambitious project in a dilapidated neighborhood now called the Lower Town Arts District. Before the real estate collapse, Paducah drew artists from all over the country to this previously devastated area, ofering them dilapidated housing for a song, and making lowinterest renovation loans available. Te artists were to restore the homes, and in the process save a neighborhood and create a tourist attraction. And it worked. Sort of. Te neighborhood is still a showplace of lovely restored homes. But with the economic collapse of 2008, tourism plummeted. Artists without representation by galleries elsewhere or with no additional income source could not survive on the meager stream of visitors who remained. Galleries closed. Many of those that remain are open to the public unpredictably. Trying to fgure out which ones we might be able to visit, we stop at a cute restored Texaco station with a sign announcing "Lower Town Information Center." I knock on the door, but the man inside continues to play his violin while a youngster, also clutching a violin, watches him play. How charming. I think. What tourist wouldn't appreciate this microconcert? When the man stops playing, I ask him if he has any tourist information. He seems puzzled. I point to the sign and ask again. He fumbles around for a while, uncertain. "Do you have a map to the galleries?" I ask. He points to a map taped to the window. I guess we are supposed to memorize it. Carol and Steve Gabany, owners of the Egg & I Bed and Breakfast on Sixth

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