Friday night we went to the Patriotic Concert at Transylvania as we always do. On the way we passed the corner of Third and Elm Tree Ln.

This is what the art stop looked like around noon on Thursday and below is a rendering of the completed project.

Of all the project that I have blogged about along this corridor, this is probably the most exciting and the first one to be underway(and its well on its way to completion).

The sculpture (seen below) to be placed near the corner of the two streets is interesting and colorful. I hope to have some information on the sculptor in the next day or so, so stay tuned.
The Urban County Council approved a business plan for the Lyric across the street and have a construction supervisor in place so that work can begin there soon. This section of Third St is beginning to move in the right direction. And as a gentleman I spoke to last Thursday said "If we can keep the homeless from sleeping in the bus stop and graffiti off the art work, this will be real nice".

I think that this will be real nice indeed.

Art on E. Third St

Last week I attended the kick off party for the Issac Murphy Memorial Art Garden. This garden will be located at the intersection of E Third St and Midland Ave. This garden is dedicated to the memory of probably the finest jockeys of his, of maybe even all time. Murphy's skills on the race track are legendary.

The Art Garden is situated between the iconic Thoroughbred Park and the site of the old Kentucky Association race track, in an area that would now be known as "the backside", an area that jockeys know well. There will be space for both passive and performing art to be displayed and an interactive wall of art and information.

It is also the starting point for the Legacy Bike trail, to be built as a legacy project for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games. This trail will wind through town, out Newtown Pike, past the Coldstream Research Park and on to the Kentucky Horse Park. Along the way the trail will pass the Lyric Theater on the corner of Third and Elm Tree Lane, and another long awaited addition to the cultural scene of downtown and the East End. Funding for the construction is in place but operational support is being raised.

So much for the "big ticket "items. Also on the horizon is the latest "art style" bus shelter, or art stop. Diagonally across from the Lyric, on a sliver of property between Elm Tree and the Episcopal Cemetery, will soon rise Lexington's newest art stop.

Art in Motion, as I understand it, has received funding and has a preliminary design(the same guys that did the Newtown Pike shelter) and needs to have a substantial portion of the work completed by the end of June. From the sketch that I've seen, with a few tweaks here and there, it is going to be a great artistic addition to E Third St.

On the other side of the block from this location, at the Living Arts and Science Center, they have started receiving the next batch of Horse Mania statues for the summer of 2010. I wonder if they have thought about placing some of these along the Legacy Bike trail.

This should be only the start for art on E Third St.

Weekend thought for a slow weekend

Mrs. Sweeper and I have been talking about what we can do in our little backyard in the way of urban gardening and we have concluded that some raised beds would do the trick. We are now preparing to construct the same as soon as we can acquire the proper materials. The other night, while she was perusing a seed catalog, I ran across this new twist on Urban Farming. It has some really different ideas.

There is also a movement around the country for keeping chickens in the back yards in urban areas. Vancouver, Canada is now considering allowing the practice while New York, Seattle and Portland among others apparently never outlawed it. I can just see how the idea would play out in Lexington. Could we again see live chickens being sold at the Farmers Market? Could you take them home if you went to the market on the bus?

This would be a large step toward re-localization of agriculture.

A preview of the plans for the East End were released to the newspaper and the whole plan will be unveiled tomorrow night. That means that the easy work is done. Now the hard part, getting the implementation work started with little or no stimulus money.

Stimulus Watch shows that the $250,000 wish list entry has 80% of 35 votes saying that it is not a critical project. The Lyric Theater and the Issac Murphy garden are on the list and both are garnering a lot of negative votes. (The Lyric will proceed due to a previous government commitment). The Issac Murphy garden is supposed to be a Legacy project for the World Equestrian Games, so they had better start on that soon. I have also heard that there is some question about legal ownership of the property.

There is the $2 million Race Street Shotgun House Redevelopment project that does not have a description and the @250,000 renovation of the Charles Young Center, both of which are gaining negative votes. The only other project on the list is a rebuild of the signalized intersection for $200,000 and it has 2 positive votes.

The consultant has said that the people have spoken, but these are not wealthy folk in a time of recession so there will be a lot of hard work ahead of them.