Louisville Magazine

MAY 2014

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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3 8 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 OFFBEAT ABODES While most of us live in conventionally framed and laid-out houses built with conventional materials, these folks have rejected orthodoxy for homes of distinction. Resting in Peace If you're looking at a burial plot in Cave Hill Cemetery, you'll choose from one of the 6,000 available that landscape engineer Barry Morris has planned and mapped out. Morris' boss calls him "the mayor of Cave Hill." And he's earned the title. Since 1994, Morris and his wife Glenda, a retired teaching assistant, have lived in the two-bedroom apartment in the tower at the cemetery's Baxter Avenue entrance. From the street, the only hints that the building is inhabited are the air-conditioning units in the windows. Te second foor of the building has been the gatekeepers' living quarters since the building was fnished in 1881. Te Morrises, both 61, admit the apartment isn't much to see (it's small and could use some repair work), but they like living there because it's peaceful. "I'm not a city person, and this is 300 acres of country in the city, so it's nice for me to be here," Morris says. In exchange for keeping the peace at night, he gets to live rent-free. He says he rarely sees any problems. "We still have folks who get locked in," he says. "A lot of times it's young folks who want to get locked in just so they can say they were locked in." Morris likes to describe living in a cemetery as "pretty mundane." Highlights include the flming of part of the movie Elizabethtown in Cave Hill and the time members of PETA showed up to dance in chicken suits at Colonel Sanders' grave. For the latter, Morris and other cemetery staf escorted the fock outside the cemetery's front gate at the corner of Baxter Av- enue and Cherokee Road, where the chicken-suited protestors continued to dance. An elegant boardroom, with a solid mahogany table and gilded ceiling, commands the frst foor. Cave Hill's board of directors still meets there once a month. In the back of the board- room, a vault door leads to the archive that houses records of all the cemetery's burials since 1848. Morris says nobody really goes in there, though, because records are digitized now. He pulls out his smartphone and goes to an app that he can use to look up any gravesite and pin- point it on a map. Morris and his wife both say they've never seen any paranormal activity. "You tell people that you live in the cemetery and they say, 'Oh, I couldn't do that,'" Glenda says. "I think the frst (ghost) I see, I'll probably live someplace else," Barry adds. But eventually they'd be back. Morris says that, yes (because you're probably wondering), he and Glenda have already planned to be buried in the cemetery. Just not anytime soon. By Amy Talbott Photos by Chris Witzke 38-49 Real Estate.indd 38 4/18/14 4:16 PM

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