Louisville Magazine

DEC 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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34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.14 horse collars once sold there. City leaders saw the blocks of dingy buildings with cast-iron fronts as ft for one thing: the wrecking ball. In the decades after World War II, the balls swung furiously over broad sections of the heart of downtown, to make room for I-65 and, later, I-64. In the late 1960s or early '70s, a few local visionaries, notably former Mayor Charles Farnsley and Dr. Harvey Sloane, who would become mayor in 1973, began to question the wrecking-ball approach to urban rede- velopment. Encouraged by projects in town — such as the restoration of Farmington (the Federal-style home that once stood on a hemp plantation planned by Tomas Jeferson) and Locust Grove (a Georgian mansion that dates to the 1790s and has ties to Lewis and Clark) and the adaptive reuse of an old railroad station by Actors Teatre — a preservation movement blossomed. With the passage of an ordinance in 1973, the city created a Land- marks and Historic Preservation Commission to identify and protect what was architectur- ally signifcant. Saving Louisville's historic structures became fashionable. hroughout the 19th century, Main Street was a noisy and crowded commercial thoroughfare. Before the Civil War, most of the buildings were two to three stories, and perhaps the most famous of them was the original Galt House, a 60-room hotel at the northeast corner of Second and Main, on the site of the building that now houses Whiskey Row Lofts. Charles Dickens stayed there in 1842 and said he was "handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghenies." Dickens wrote: "Te interval, after break- fast, we devoted to riding through the town, which is regular and cheerful: the streets being laid out at right angles, and planted with young trees. Te buildings are smoky and blackened, from the use of bituminous coal, but an Englishman is well used to that appear- ance, and indisposed to quarrel with it." Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor and James Buchanan stayed at the Galt House. At the hotel, Gens. Grant and William T. Sherman planned their military campaigns, including the siege of Atlanta and the March to the Sea. Celebrity visitors included actor Edwin Booth (accom- plished older brother of Lincoln's assassin) and showman P.T. Barnum, with his midget su- perstar, "General" Tom Tumb. Te frst Galt House burned on Jan. 11, 1865, the result of a fre in its primitive heating system, and its successor opened one block east (on the northeast corner of First and Main) in 1869. A far grander building, designed by famed local architect Henry Whitestone (also ar- chitect of the clock tower at Louisville's City Hall and the steeple of the Cathedral of the Assumption), this Galt House became one of the nation's most famous hotels, mentioned with the Palmer House in Chicago and the Parker House in Boston. Tat version of the Galt House remained in business until 1919 and was torn down in 1921. (Te site would become the headquarters for Belknap Hard- ware and Manufacturing Co., a building that remains standing today as part of Humana's ofce complex downtown.) Lincoln came to Louisville to visit his friend Joshua Speed at Farmington in the early 1840s. Lincoln had been here as a child, with his parents, bundled into a covered wagon as they sought a new life in Indiana. It was in Louisville where Lincoln witnessed the brutality of slavery, almost certainly in the block of slave pens between Main and Market on Second Street, just south of Main, right across from Whiskey Row. Although Louis- ville harbored much anti-slavery, pro-Union sentiment, shackled slaves squeezed into pens before being sold or shipped "down the river" to New Orleans, until the 13th Amendment was enacted in 1865. How ironic that Union troops marched down Main Street in October 1861, past those hellish pens operated by a Matthew Garretson. Despite periodic interruptions in its rail ser- vice (and, until 1863, the closing of the lower Mississippi River — including New Orleans — to northern steamboat travel), Louisville was abuzz with commerce, with some 80,000 Union troops stationed here. Along Main Street, arriving riverboats, too large for the fedgling Portland Canal, unloaded their cargo to be portaged across the city to Portland, where it was reloaded on boats heading south and west. hat we know today as Whiskey Row began to take shape in the de- cade just before the war. Te facade at 105 W. Main is thought to have been designed by Whitestone. It was erected circa 1877 as a whiskey warehouse, following a fre that consumed a structure previously occupied by Cochran and Fulton, the city's oldest liquor wholesaler on record. Vacant since the late 1980s (the bars and nightclubs had shuttered), it was acquired (along with the majority of the block) by developer Todd Blue, who unsuccessfully attempted to redevelop the properties as the mixed-use development dubbed the Iron Quarter. For $4.85 million in 2011, a group of investors called Main Street Revitalization "This is one of the most extraordinary blocks in America, and it is a miracle that all of this was not bulldozed over the years," Christy Brown says. T W Archives and Special Collections, U of L C. 1930

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