And they think the street names confuse people

Lexington developer Phil Holoubek recently completed the conversion of the old Nunn Building to condos and by all accounts has done a fine job. The new section fits well with the renovated office building and presents a beautiful face to N Martin Luther King Blvd.

Their website has a number of photos taken before and during the construction and final landscape work. All of the exterior shots are from North M.L.K. and some almost show the entry to the basement garage with the residents only door beside it. The driveway, if you will, comes directly off M.L.K., just like the homes being built in the new subdivisions and the wall beside it has their signature metallic logo displayed.

If you have followed all this so far, it is now time to reiterate just how Lexington's addressing system is laid out. Back in 1902 the city fathers directed the office of the City Engineer to set in motion a plan to renumber all addresses in Lexington.

Starting at the intersection of Main St and Limestone, thereby declaring it to be the center of town, he made streets crossing and running parallel to Main Street, east of Limestone, prefixed with East. And conversely the other direction was prefixed with West. The addresses were set with the odd numbers to the north side and even to the south. Similarly, the streets crossing and running parallel to Limestone, north of Main St. to be prefixed with North, and the other direction South.

A simple system. Easy to understand once you get the concept. The City then made all the sign changes and required all the houses and businesses to post their new addresses. This system, with just a few modifications is still in place today.

This brings us back to the Nunn Lofts situation. The Nunn building once held the Herald newspaper and the WVLK radio station. They used the address 121 Walnut St., which the Urban County Council changed to Martin Luther King. Mr. Holoubek retained the number for historical purposes and has displayed it beside the front door as required, even though he bricked up the original entry and steps.

Mr. Holoubek placed his new, main entry on the addition where it looks more like a back door than a welcoming urban doorway. See below.




What we see here is the south side of East Short St., which, as we saw previously, is supposed to be addressed with an even number. So, if you are looking for The Nunn Lofts and you go by the system, then you would end up at the wrong door, where you couldn't get in.

And you thought the arbitrary changing of street names as you glide through intersections was confusing.

Downtown circulator madness

Things are starting to bounce with the Downtown Circulator, don't call them "trolleys". The Mayor wants them called the Circulator. Their latest steering committee meeting showed some interesting direction to their thought.

First concern out of the box is -how to fund the Circulator system- not do the people want this thing as proposed. The facts are that they have already decided to move on the project, have $1,212,000.00 in cash to buy the 'I can't call them trolleys' and can't come up with any operating funds.

So, how are they funding it?

Fares? No, we want it to be free, at least initially.

Advertising? Sure, let's trash the outside with garish posters or maybe the vinyl billboards like the buses. And let's place a big TV monitor on the inside and blare ad at the riders all day.

Corporate branding? Yes, let's sell the "sponsorship" of a (cough trolley cough) to a corporation for some simple tasteful brand design.

Private sector? Well, wait a minute, all options should be explored before asking for funds from private sector. Before approaching the business community for sponsorship, every federal, state and local revenues must be explored. Companies will need to be shown the benefit of permanently exposing their name on the "trolley" and the benefit the "trolley" will bring to the downtown businesses. Is there any business that doesn't know the purpose of advertising?

Furthermore, Lextran should put out a simple budget to show the taxpayers how the money could be spent. Is that because we aren't anything more than simple.

Then hit the Bluegrass Community Foundation and other "charities" before asking the business community (who will benefit from this effort).

Now let's talk about the design. Of the routes? No, the "trolleys", what are they going to look like?

Well, from the public input meetings, the people clearly said that they liked the old fashioned trolleys. Mrs. Sweeper and I gave our input, and I believe we asked for a more "traditional style" vehicle. Not a "Disney-esque" imitation built on a school bus/truck frame. If you are going to imitate something go for the real deal. Try looking at "Traction in the Blue Grass" by local author William M.. Ambrose, especially from pages 100-127.

Hybrid or electric? Ahhh... Those are very expensive, but it could be a novelty.

Maintenance? Yes we maintain them, that's got be a priority when purchasing the trolley.

Attractive? But, also a good value that meets ADA requirements.

Color? Keeneland Green, definitely, Let's overuse that color, Lets put it on everything in sight.

A "name"? By all means, we will need that when we have to sell this to the public.

Finally, let's talk about routing, where will it go? And when?

Starting off, we will just do the downtown loop: Main, Vine and back again. Every five minutes. Round and round and round. And, let's go small, just the lunchtime folks, just give them a 2 hour window, see if the like it. Maybe we'll put the door on the left side of the vehicle, let the people out on the inside of the loop, where the businesses aren't. We will also need a North/South route, with a larger night-time window for the "creative class" at Transylvania and UK.

After an initial success, if there is any, the service can be expanded. The demand from ridership will guide the system. How can you rate demand if the service is free, people will ride anything if its free.

We should have seasoned drivers that can give a history of the city and act as a tour guide. What about the old adage about "Don't talk to the driver while the bus is in motion?"


Seriously folks, we have been down this road before. It failed the first time from lack of demand and excessive maintenance costs. A sign of insanity is trying the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

Rumor has it that KU, the power company, is willing to buy two fully electric trams(I did not say the "t" word), now that would be a novelty and a tourism attraction. Dress one out in UK blue and the other in Transy crimson.

My kind of industry

Here is an industry we need to lure to the Central Kentucky area. One that will grow in popularity over the years

Building public infrastructure -Roads-

With this summers rapid rise in gas prices, the federal highway trust fund should have taken a load of money--except that people drove less--and the total tax receipts fell. And with this decline, states cut back on the road building projects funded by such tax revenues.

Add to this situation a new twist, the lack of road-building material, asphalt. Refineries nationwide have installed new devices called "cokers" that can take the lowest grade (and least expensive) oil and produce highly profitable fuel, gasoline and diesel fuel. So, where once 40% of a barrel of oil would go to asphalt, now only 10% makes it to the road surface. To top that off, a petrochemical used to make the roads more durable has declined in production, thereby making it more expensive, to the point that some states are leaving it out of the construction contract. This makes the roads that do get built, less likely to last the designed time period.

So, is the bottom line that we settle for more expensive roads that don't last and drive cars that consume fuel that we can't afford? Neither of these two scenarios could be called sustainable.

What we need to do is start to plan for real mass transit, a streetcar system that runs on a renewable energy such as electricity, generated from water, wind, solar, and/or nuclear sources. Plan for a regional rail system so that no one needs to commute more than a few miles by auto (and preferably 1/2 mile by foot). Neighborhoods need to be walkable and street surfaces be of concrete or stone(I would love to streets of cobblestone here).

A real system of light rail from subdivisions to downtown, regional rail to the outlying suburbs and intercity rail to Louisville, Cincinnati, Nashville, Knoxville and beyond. Walkable neighborhoods with nodes of small retail interspersed at +/- 1/2 mile intervals, filled with shops of fresh foods and services. If all this sounds like the European model, then why not, it has worked for them for much longer than our American system.

Streetscape and music clubs

Back in the spring and early summer Lexington had a running dialogue about how the redevelopment of a downtown block would ruin the "entertainment district" that the "creative class" had begun. How the vitality of the block would be lost and the area would become boring like the rest of downtown.

I received this from DC Metrocentric by way of Greater Greater Washington. It points out how the clubs (music venues) do have a vitality at night, but can leave the area very dead in the daytime. Maybe that is why they are relegated to industrial zones in the DC area.

Downtown vitality should not be measured by just one group or one location, but for the whole area on a 24 hour clock.

Second Sundays to Sunday parkways

I wrote before on the possibilities of expanding Lexington's observance of Second Sunday in October. Now I find that Chicago held two events that month and from their website, encouraged people to call their aldermen(council members)to ask for more. They call their program Sunday Parkways, but it does the same thing, it gives the streets back to the people if only for a short while.

Again I encourage you to work to expand this worthwhile project and bring it to the neighborhoods.

Downtown art

Downtown has had some form of public art since the mid 19th century. In many cases this came in the form of monuments, commemorating the accomplishments some well known residents but mostly in the form of memorials the valiant war/public servant dead. There is one other, the one in Gratz Park, in the fountain,which memorializes a famous Lexington author. Public art, for the most part, has been an indoor exhibition and it has only been in the last several years that the city has brought them outdoors.

My memory has faded a bit, but if I recall correctly, the Festival Market had a bronze statue on Main St. It depicted a young lad sharing his ice cream cone with his sister. This was the first piece of outdoor art I had seen other than the aforementioned memorials. The statue was removed when the Marketplace failed to do what the owners expected and was sold at auction. In the 1990's the Thoroughbred Park received its horses. The ones on the hill, the ones on the track and the ones at each end of the track. Then in 2000 The Flying Horse of Gansu took its place across from City Hall. It has just been reset in place after an expensive rebuilding, following a support failure.(something about inferior Chinese workmanship or materials or the like)

For downtown, that is about it. Then there are the occasional temporary artwork displays. First, there were the decorated horses. They were not all downtown and some are still on display in their new locations. Second , were the decorated doors. Doors from the demolitions in Bluegrass-Aspendale were painted and displayed, then sold, gone from view and from most folks memory.

For the last year the local arts organizations have placed some larger 3-d pieces in various sites downtown as temporary public art. At the top of the post are two photos, one of the recent temporary art and the other an example of the older memorial art. If any of you who may read this have any opinion, drop me a line and tell me how you feel about one or the other.

Freeways and the past (planning)

Lexington's planning for a freeway through the middle of town began as part of the Urban Renewal project of the 1960's. See graphic below. It was to run from an interchange with the Louisville-Cattletsburg and Cincinnati-Tennessee highway, now known as I-64/I-75, along the old L&N railroad tracks into town, then along(or replacing) Midland Ave to Main St, swinging south of the downtown district slicing (literally) through the portion called South Hill. Continuing on to an intersection with an extended Newtown Pike, then on to the four-laned Versailles Rd.



It was going to be beautiful. A wide, sweeping gash right through the heart of historic downtown. In order to minimize the damage to the residential fabric of the city, the decision was made do depress the road starting at Main St. until the Newtown interchange. Half of the existing north-south streets would bridge the chasm, while the rest would be truncated. It would be a freeway with miles of beautiful concrete for miles, to try and paraphrase Judge Doom of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In the past, it had been the railroad that had sliced through town and with it, a station for passengers to get off, right in the middle of town. But railroads were a dying mode of transportation, a relic of the past. Private automobiles were the only way to go, having reemerged to primacy with the upcoming completion of the Interstate system. Passenger trains were too slow, the Interstate will get us there in no time, and this freeway will bring people back downtown, right to the center of town.

Boy, those must have been heady times. WWII and Korea were over, we weren't bogged down in Vietnam (yet)and everything we did was right. We were on our way to the moon. Looking back on it makes me glad that someone thought a little more about things and shot this idea down.

If this debacle had been left alone, can you imagine the relationship between the City and the University? This man-made trench would have created an inhospitable space between the dying commercial, though growing professional city and the academic ivory tower of the University campus. The experiences of other cities have shown us that such freeways have unseen costs in the form of the price paid for separating two parts of a synergistic system. The gap, though only about 150-200 feet wide to begin with, would surely be wider today, as every urban expressway that I've ever seen has had to have extra lanes added. If you build it, they will drive on it.

Add to this the idea of the North-South freeway. Essentially, this was the extension of Newtown Pike. From W. Main St past the East-West to the Southern Railway tracks and along them (or replace them), south to Nicholasville. How in the world the leaders of Lexington thought that they could persuade an active railroad to vacate property, I'll never know. It took years of work to deal with the C&O for the removal of the tracks downtown, and that was with a railroad that was abandoning a line all the way to Ashland, Ky. The Southern Ry. was in the process of expanding its traffic, in particular, their RoadRailer service as their passenger traffic had died. The ICC at the time let railroads do whatever they wanted and the courts backed them up. If this freeway had been built, basically along a drainage divide between the South Elkhorn and the East Hickman Creek basins, it could have split Lexington worse than any railroad.

These are some of the reasons that I am happy that we don't have any freeways through our downtown, and I hope to keep it that way.

Freeways and the future

I am so glad that we do not have problems such as these. I just read about the Congress for New Urbanism's list of freeways that the people think should be removed.
The closest one to me is in Louisville and I can concur wholeheartedly. The State of Kentucky will only waste money, that it does not have, if it continues on this road.

The voters of the Louisville area voted one of the major supporters of expanding the freeway out of office, partially to slow the effects of this project. Anne Northup then ran for governor, I feel, to endorse and build this project. Thankfully, she was defeated. Again she is running for the 3rd district(Louisville) representative and again one of her main goals is to expand what the people don't want, the mess of highways along the river.

What Lexington(and Louisville) needs are alternative forms of transportation from the freeways and highways that divide us from our historic roots. Lexington, in the form of its downtown area and Louisville, it riverfront.

We need to support more of this kind of thinking.

CentrePointe and Dining

I heard from a poster on a forum that I frequent, about behind the scenes conversations dealing with CentrePointe. Seems that the desires are, for a "high end" steak house to have a prime spot in the hotel/condo complex. There were some names offered of national steak houses, along the lines of Morton's, Fleming's and Capital Grille. I have heard that some local houses like Sal's and Malone's could be moving in to the downtown area, but something national is something else.

This got another forum poster involved, to question whether or not we already had too many steak houses and was not the market saturated already.

Ugh, is there anything more generic than a "steak house"?? Seriously, doesnt Lexington (and most towns) pretty much have that market licked.

I mean, its a downtown location. Put something in that isnt found on every block in the suburbs that'll actually get people down there. Doesnt have to be something totally niche & off the wall, but shouldnt be something so cliche as a steak house either.

Besides, the type of people that usually migrate to downtowns like Lexington are usually the kind who like to break from that suburban mold & aren't your average cats. Most are kinda eccentric, probably some vegetarians too.

At least this is how most cities get gentrified. The eccentrics come first, then the norms follow.

KerryB

This, of course, got my blood going and I responded with things like, an upper level restaurant should not have to tempt all the suburban residents downtown every night, and restaurants in or associated with hotels are not specifically designed to draw people downtown. I think that hotel associated restaurants and even those local ones that locate near hotels are primarily interested in grabbing the traveling visitor. Hotel food is usually out of range of the typical downtown resident in this day and age.

The downtown fine dining establishments need to try to keep the day workers and business people in town rather than let them get home to the suburbs and then make their way back. The only exceptions would be for special occasions and the occasional evening event (Opera House, Rupp Arena). Hotel associated restaurants are a part of this but it is not their "bread and butter", those staying in the hotel are their main guests.

When I look at the Hyatt Regency, and their in-house dining, I don't see the local crowds that I used to. When it first opened as the the Glass Garden, it drew a good number of locals, locals who had not been to a Hyatt hotel or at least one in town. These were generally older patrons dining after church on Sunday or families going out to someplace special. This was also the mid 1970's and Lexingtonian's had a history of going to the hotel and motel restaurants on Sunday, as they were the only places open for these "after church" meals. The Campbell House and The Springs both did a great business in the Fifties and Sixties as places to go eat on Sundays.

Moving forward to the mid 1980's and the opening of the Radisson, by now many chain fast food places and local restaurants had been forced to be open on Sundays and Sunday liquor sales were not far away, but I can't recall the Cafe on the Park drawing large local crowds, ever.

Lexington has moved forward since the Seventies when it had close to 180,000 residents, it now has almost double that. The residents of Lexington have taken on a feeling similar to New Yorkers(except that we feel that we are still a small town), that downtown is where the big businessman goes to work, the rest of us work and shop in suburbia, and I only go downtown when I have too. Going downtown, to today's youngsters is the same as going on a trip to Cincinnati or Louisville to me at that age. Going to see friends on the other side of town means, going around New Circle or Man o' War, not going through downtown.

Maybe that is why the young people of college age, when they "discover" downtown, realize that it is not as bad as they feared and take ownership of what they think others have abandoned, then feel betrayed when the real owners exert their powers and change things.

I see CentrePointe changing downtown in a good way. I see CentrePointe complimenting the existing and planned condominium projects and any other new residential in the downtown area. What I would like to see is enhanced transit options, other housing options and well used(not just often used) public spaces. More good public art, not displayed piles of former scrap metal, is not too much to ask along with displaying pride of ownership of the downtown properties, not just pushing the sale or lease of them.

One more great restaurant or one more great music or art venue is not going to make downtown irresistible for the local resident but they will give us one more option for us to make a good impression on the visiting public. And another good option for a special night out.