Monday, May 01, 2017

City Market at Louisville Gardens? Ideas, please.

Louisville Armory, 1905.

There's a new Facebook page for brainstorming: "This page created by Byron Hoagland as a citizen activist/urban dreamer. Feel free to throw more ideas on the pile!"

City Market at Louisville Gardens

The missing link to downtown Louisville's potential resurgence as a livable/walkable neighborhood...A Central Market. What better location? The Gardens!

In 2014, Melissa Chipman surveyed the building's past and present.

Urban ruin: A tour of the deteriorating historic Louisville Gardens, by Melissa Chipman (Insider Louisville)

 ... Louisville Gardens was built as the Jefferson County Armory in 1905 and designed by Brinton B. Davis, a native of Natchez, Miss. who later settled in Louisville. Most people think of an armory as a place to store munitions, but it was much more than that, explained Morris ...

 ... The 220,000-square-foot building is “built like a European train station” and its basement is a bit of a maze. There is definite evidence of people having fairly recently lived in the basement  ...

 ... The city of Louisville acquired the building during the city-county merger in 2003. It has been completely out of operation since 2009, and the city now uses it for storage. You could furnish a whole office building with the chairs and desks and filing cabinets scattered around the arena.

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