Every historic building has a story to tell
It’s taken five years, but a bungalow and Tudor Revival style house on Nicholasville Road are now piles of rubble. Due to strident owner opposition, these properties were removed from the boundaries of the Pensacola Park H-1 District in Lexington, Kentucky, when it was approved in 2019. Their demolition may have long been in the (read more)
Category: Fayette County
In 1908, an advertisement for the Pineville Hotel promised “first class entertainment” and a “congenial climate in most beautiful mountain section.” The hotel, at the southwest corner of Kentucky Avenue and Oak Street, was a handsome, four-story brick building with a wrap-around metal balcony on the facade and west elevations, a prime spot from (read more)
Category: Bell County
Tags: #hotel, #pinevilleky, demolition
Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time, and are blissfully oblivious of this fact. Last Tuesday, in my large straw hat, clutching two cameras, I made my way through downtown Greenville, Kentucky, the county seat of Muhlenberg County. I always take the long road home, visiting towns I don’t know, and (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Muhlenberg County
Tags: #greenvilleky, #kentuckyarchitecture, #muhlenbergcountyky, demolition
Affordable housing is a pressing matter – crucial even – for most communities in this country. So it strikes me as asinine that a well-built, conveniently located 12-unit apartment building in Lexington (1320-1324 Versailles Road) is slated for demolition – for another gas station? I am not sure how the Planning Commission thinks this will (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Fayette County
Tags: #lexingtonky, #lucillecaudilllittle, #wreckingballwatch, demolition
The last home designed by Lexington architect John McMurtry – a man who shaped much of the high-style architecture of 19th century Kentucky – has received its death notice. A demolition application has been filed for the Thomas B. Watkins House, located at 1008 South Broadway, at the southwest corner of S. Broadway and Virginia (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Fayette County
Tags: Clay Lancaster, demolition, John McMurtry, Lexington Kentucky demolition
Around 1913, a farm “lying and being about 2.5 miles from Lexington on what is known as the Leestown Turnpike Road,” was in a beautiful and rural spot. Sadly, any bucolic charm of the early 20th century is now in short supply – save for the occasional historic house – like the Willmott House at (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Fayette County
Tags: demolition, George F. Wilmott, H.F. Hillenmeyer, Leestown Pike
This not a post about Miley Cyrus and her 2013 hit – although there are some similarities between the breaking of a relationship and the fracturing of a neighborhood. Demolitions, neglect, absentee landlords – each element chips away at the structure and fabric of a community, and as buildings fall, a piece of that community (read more)
In the mid-19th century, it became popular in rural America for farmers of a certain class to name their farms – usually with evocatively pastoral names – sometimes referencing landscape elements found at the site. The Cedars, Elmwood, Mt. Pleasant: all names of Bluegrass farms that crop up often. Hedgeland, though, is not one I’ve (read more)
I typically don’t like to write about buildings I’ve never seen in person – the experience of cataloging a house in my head as my eyes dart over its various components, and walking through its rooms, imbues a meaning that goes far beyond the facade (and what can be seen in a photograph). That said, (read more)
The chain link fences have gone up, making visible the divide between what was and what shall be – from tired reminders of former neighborhoods to blank earth, littered by concrete and gravel. And with the demolition of these houses, one of the last vestiges of the Virginia Avenue neighborhood between South Limestone and South (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Fayette County, Historic architecture, Historic Preservation, Kentucky architecture, Lexington Kentucky History, Lexington neighborhoods, Vernacular architecture
Tags: Adamstown, demolition, Lottie Street, Lottie Street Presbyterian Church, Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church, Porter Memorial Baptist Church, University of Kentucky, Virginia Avenue, W.S. Griffing
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