Louisville Magazine

DEC 2015

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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26 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.15 Point of No Return By Jack Welch Illustration by Carrie Neumayer Recalling the ghosts of River Road. JUST SAYIN' When old neighborhoods die and disappear, the last things to vanish — besides houses and their foundations — are the streets they were built along. I'm thinking specifcally about Shippingport, whose denouement became fnal in 1958 when whatever dwellings remained on McHarry, Plum, Tarascon, Florida and Hemp streets were unceremoniously leveled to make room for a McAlpine Locks project; the pre-foodwall Portland Wharf, where such streets as Water, Mississippi and Missouri still showed up on Louisville maps in the late 1950s; and, upriver, the Point, a peninsular neighborhood spawned by the original path of Beargrass Creek. Until 1854, when the Beargrass Cut-off was dug to divert the creek's natural course straight north to the Ohio River, Beargrass had fowed from Story Avenue due west for two miles to its original mouth near Third Street downtown, creating the Point, with Butchertown its across-the-creek southern neighbor. Historical sources say that wealthy French families from New Orleans, seeking an escape from stifing Gulf summers, built sizable vacation homes on the Point starting in the 1840s. They were joined by other newly enfranchised Americans, including German immigrant stone-cutter Christian Heigold, whose legacy lives on in the ornately carved Heigold House façade (circa 1865), which now stands at Frankfort Avenue and River Road after a few Derby Clock-ish relocations. Jobs at the Point's shipyards and sawmills drew a substantial working-class population, as well as a shantytown of squatters. By the dawn of the 20th century, a grid of 18 streets crisscrossed the Point west of the Cut-off — streets with names such as Fulton, Irvine, Lombard, Clinton, Marion (where the Heigold House frst stood), Lloyd, Wayne, Powhatan and Pocahontas. East of the Cut-off, another 15 streets sprouted. Schools, churches, groceries located there. But damage from a major food in 1913 — long before the coup de grace foods of 1937 and '45 — marked the beginning of the end. In an April Courier-Journal article from that year, city leaders — having given up hope of another neighborhood resurrection (rebuilding from previous foods) — discussed two contradictory solutions: turning the Point into a park and turning a section of the neighborhood into the city dump, which, the reasoning went, would eventually create high ground. (And you can see that it did if you visit the city's Vehicle Impoundment Lot and the expansive adjacent landfll.) The park, Thruston, replaced dozens of homes and yards and has itself been whittled over time on land that now accommodates the Brown-Forman Amphitheater, Louisville Rowing Club and the WaterSide at RiverPark Place apartment complex (where you can fnd the brick shell of another "saved" Point property — the 1830s-built Paget House). It's hard to imagine today that a four-by- eight-block grid of residential streets once occupied the densely forested acreage across River Road from Eva Bandman Park, itself a Point reclamation project. Of course it was hard to imagine back then that a new Point boundary would arrive in the mid-1960s: I-71, following the old Beargrass course. derbydinner.com

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