The city and the land tell a story.
When I first came to Louisville in the early 1990's as a graduate student I was taken aback about how curvy the streets were and that the streets were leading to other cities such as Bardstown Rd, Taylorsville Rd, Lexington Rd, and Shelbyville Rd. It was very different from Minneapolis, Minnesota where I had moved from where everything was in a cartesian grid and the cities were almost purely alphabetically ordered such as Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Durant, Emerson, Fremont up and down from the northern suburbs such as Fridley, Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park all the way down through Richfield, Edina, and Bloomington (you know where the Mall of America is).
When I returned to Louisville in 2000 and entered the U of L school of urban and public affairs, I appreciated that Louisville developed the way it did around the trolley system and the streets were like branches of a tree. Buechel was a stop on one of those branches and local farmers could put produce on to be sold at the downtown Haymarket.
That history lesson aside, you can tell that the majority of the Bon Air Neighborhood grew up like a weed between 1952 and 1957 around the farm land of one of the Hikes Homes, the Bray Mansion, a horse farm, and other older structures.
So, the fact that Goldsmith Lane goes in an crooked L pattern has intrigued me, especially where it crosses at Bon Air Avenue. You know, this is the part of Goldsmith that always seems to develop potholes every two years like right now.
Why was it this way? What was so special about the land that it would be a triangle and not just a line of houses. The reality is that part of it is a cemetery. There is actually a plot of land that is owned by no one, but it has an address of 3227 Bon Air Avenue.
The other is owned by a party that has no other land in the neighborhood. According to land records he has owned it since 2005. We will not mention his name here, I am surprised that the party just did not try and give the land over the to City of Louisville or the State of Kentucky for historical perseveration.
My source, who values privacy said that there was a grave marker there at one time that no longer exists. There is a question as to who or what was buried there? Was it a horse? Was it the graveyard for slaves when slavery was in practice?
So the story is that the roads were routed around the cemetery as reverence for the sanctity of humanity. The sad part is that we do not know who is there.
When I first came to Louisville in the early 1990's as a graduate student I was taken aback about how curvy the streets were and that the streets were leading to other cities such as Bardstown Rd, Taylorsville Rd, Lexington Rd, and Shelbyville Rd. It was very different from Minneapolis, Minnesota where I had moved from where everything was in a cartesian grid and the cities were almost purely alphabetically ordered such as Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Durant, Emerson, Fremont up and down from the northern suburbs such as Fridley, Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park all the way down through Richfield, Edina, and Bloomington (you know where the Mall of America is).
When I returned to Louisville in 2000 and entered the U of L school of urban and public affairs, I appreciated that Louisville developed the way it did around the trolley system and the streets were like branches of a tree. Buechel was a stop on one of those branches and local farmers could put produce on to be sold at the downtown Haymarket.
That history lesson aside, you can tell that the majority of the Bon Air Neighborhood grew up like a weed between 1952 and 1957 around the farm land of one of the Hikes Homes, the Bray Mansion, a horse farm, and other older structures.
So, the fact that Goldsmith Lane goes in an crooked L pattern has intrigued me, especially where it crosses at Bon Air Avenue. You know, this is the part of Goldsmith that always seems to develop potholes every two years like right now.
Why was it this way? What was so special about the land that it would be a triangle and not just a line of houses. The reality is that part of it is a cemetery. There is actually a plot of land that is owned by no one, but it has an address of 3227 Bon Air Avenue.
The other is owned by a party that has no other land in the neighborhood. According to land records he has owned it since 2005. We will not mention his name here, I am surprised that the party just did not try and give the land over the to City of Louisville or the State of Kentucky for historical perseveration.
My source, who values privacy said that there was a grave marker there at one time that no longer exists. There is a question as to who or what was buried there? Was it a horse? Was it the graveyard for slaves when slavery was in practice?
So the story is that the roads were routed around the cemetery as reverence for the sanctity of humanity. The sad part is that we do not know who is there.
I spoke to that owner on the phone once. He was nice but didn't seem to know anything about it either. There was a fractured headstone...is it completely gone now?
ReplyDeleteI was once told that was where Proctor Knott the racehorse is buried.
ReplyDelete