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2 6 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 in overstufed chairs smoking big cigars. Like a terrarium. Over there is the Horner Novelty store, certainly full of streamers and costumes and confetti. I'm tempted to check inside to see if they've got the ever-popular vomit splat — always a hit at parties — but there's a "Go Big Blue Kentucky Wildcats" display in the window, so I move on. Back on the bike, I set of for the Howard Steamboat Museum and the Jefboat yards, up Market Street and out Utica Pike. Bicyclists have long plied the riverside road east to Utica, but I duck back a block and start out on parallel Chestnut Street. Te frst few blocks are flled with pretty churches. A particularly nice one is First Presbyterian — not ornate or huge, but with beautiful rising lines, like a brick hymn. Te churches get me poking around the neighborhood and I dodge over to Court Avenue to the Old Jef Fieldhouse, former home of the Jefersonville High Red Devils and iconic in the history of Indiana basketball. Built in 1937 and now ofcially called Nachand Fieldhouse, the place is one of those famous old Indiana basketball barns. It's open every day for recreational leagues, but if you step inside you're back in another era. Tis isn't the quaint, tiny gym of Hickory High in the movie Hoosiers. Jef is the kind of Hoosier powerhouse little Hickory would be trying to conquer, like Muncie Central or Indianapolis Crispus Attucks. Te balcony up high by the arched roof is still there, but the bleachers that reached all the way down to the playing foor are gone. Te foor, though, is still there, and with the right kind of imagination you can almost hear the shuddering quakes and volleys of Indiana high school basketball. B ack out in the sunshine, I get back over to Chestnut Street and ride leisurely through leafy neighborhoods. At the Bethel A.M.E. church I turn right and coast a block back toward the river to the Howard Steamboat Museum. It's a big old stone barn of a mansion built in the 1890s by the Howard family, just across the street from their shipyard. Te exterior of the home, in architectural terms, is heavy Richardsonian Romanesque. But inside, the mansion is laced with "gingerbread" ornateness of Steamboat architecture. Samuel Langhorne Clemens would have been right at home. "All this wonderful woodwork," says Howard director and curator Keith Norrington, "was created by craftsmen from the shipyard. Te steamboats were wooden, of course, and they built the interior of the mansion as they would for the fnest steamboats of the era." A centerpiece of the frst foor is a wide, grand staircase to the second foor. Reminiscent of the majestic stairway in the movie Titanic. Only the Titanic was borrowing the look from sumptuous steamboats — such as what Norrington says was the Howards' grandest boat, the J.M. White. "A newspaperman reported his feet sank ankle-deep in the carpet," Norrington tells me. Steamboat bufs head straight for the second foor, which houses the memorabilia of 19th- century American steamboating. Tere are many models and replicas of steamboats, and pictures and documents. But the best part, in my book, is all the artifacts of steamboat construction, including wooden design models and iron machinery of the great ships. Mighty as they were, the steamboats didn't last long — maybe three to fve years before they blew up, or burned, or had their wooden hulls ripped out by rocky bars and underwater snags. "But the Howards would build you another one," says Norrington. "Steamboat trade was so proftable that Mr. Howard could show a merchant how he could probably recoup the cost of a new boat in one trip." Te J.M. White lasted from 1878-'86, when, loaded with a cargo of gunpowder, it exploded and burned in the Port of New Orleans. Can you imagine a steamboat loaded with gunpowder exploding?! Make Tunder Over Louisville look like frecrackers. Gazing out a window across the shipyard to the river, volunteer Lowell Smith notes all the river activity of the present day. He points over to the Kentucky side, where two tugs are maneuvering several barges at a riverside facility. "Tat's the McBride feet," says Smith. "It's a famous family business on the river, very respected." Upriver toward Utica, a new East End bridge is being built. Jefersonville Redevelopment Director Rob Waiz says the city is planning new hiking and biking trails to link Jef's eastern neighborhoods with the bridge and downtown Jef. "Tat bridge is being built with a pedestrian and bike way," Waiz says, "which means we will be able to connect our new trail system with what Louisville is doing on the other side with the Hundred Mile Loop. We'll connect at the Utica bridge and at the Big Four." Heading back toward downtown Jef, I cruise past the Vintage Fire Museum. Its collection was assembled by the late Fred Conway, explains Curtis Peters, head of the museum's foundation board. But Conway didn't start out as a fre-engine buf. "Mr. Conway had a big industrial decal business in New Albany that he had started www.mynortondoctor.com 24-31 Dept.indd 26 4/18/14 10:51 AM