Every historic building has a story to tell
Stories and the people who created them enliven the most basic of buildings. Sometimes, of course, stories of personal tragedy envelop a structure like a cloud, and that cloud overshadows the most elegant and masterful of designs. So it is with Meadowcrest, an imposing Neo-Georgian house designed by prominent local architect Robert McMeekin in 1931. (read more)
Categories: Demolition, Fayette County
Tags: #hamburgplace, #JohnEMadden, #kentuckyarchitecture, #lexingtonky, thoroughbreds
The congregation of the Greater Liberty Baptist Church dates to around 1882, when several members of the Main Street Baptist Church, an African American church founded in 1862, left to form their own church. The new congregation built a church on Corral Street, but as the church membership swelled, the church moved again and again. (read more)
When I was in graduate school, I wrote a very bad paper about the changes wrought on one block of East Main Street. Every time I walk past what was once known as the “Ben Snyder Block,” I cringe at the memory of my poor research skills, lack of engagement with the assignment, and procrastination (read more)
Categories: Fayette County, Historic architecture
Tags: #adaptivereuse, #artdeco, #kentuckyarchitecture, #lexingtonky
Four years ago, a long vacant historic frame building on East Third street collapsed. I wrote about the former store/residence the day after it crashed creaking and groaning to the ground, but I had been wondering about the building for years before its demise. As is often the case, I learned more about the building (read more)
Athens is a fairly quiet place these days. Not the Athens of the ancient world, mind you, but the one with the long A sound at the beginning, situated in southeastern Fayette County, Kentucky. First settled as Cross Plains in 1783, the crossroads town grew up at the intersection of two buffalo traces, later to (read more)
Categories: Fayette County, Kentucky Places
I’ve enjoyed a lifelong love affair with mail-order catalogs. The arrival of the mail meant a 1/4 mile hike down the gravel driveway to the big metal mailbox (an enticing target for mailbox baseball players), and back up the hill again holding the treasure (secured by at least two large rubber bands) of three daily (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)
The ache that engulfs me when a historic building is needlessly demolished pales in comparison to the visceral pain of seeing farmland chopped, desecrated, and turned into to miles of pavement. Lexington provides the perfect backdrop to examine this transition, but occasionally a vestige of those long-ago pastures and fields can be found along a busy road (read more)
A house is much more than just shelter. Historically, homes have functioned as symbols of expression, wealth, and power – for those who could afford such brick and mortar displays – and a house on a corner lot in town commanded maximum exposure. And in the frenzy of the late-19th century, when styles and materials (read more)
Too often, historic buildings are lost to the siren song of redevelopment, bulldozers sending dust and debris flying so quickly that it is hard to believe that generations of people used and occupied the structures so quickly tumbled to the ground. When I read in the paper this morning that the building at the corner (read more)
Interested in a specific topic? Check out some popular categories below, or enter your search terms in the box.