Wrecking Ball Watch: The Thomas B. Watkins House, 1008 S. Broadway, Lexington, Kentucky

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 Avenue. The brick house, constructed in 1887, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), and was designed by McMurtry for his daughter Anne and her family.

The façade of the Watkins House.

For 10 years, I worked in a former tobacco warehouse within view of the Watkins House, and wrote about the dwelling in 2017. At that time the house, long used as offices, was vacant. Two years later, the elegant porches on the house were boarded up with plywood, presumably to prevent the homeless residents of Lexington from sleeping under their shelter.

One of the side porches boarded up in the fall of 2019.

According to architectural historian Water Langsam, the author of the NRHP nomination for the property, the house “summarizes many of the themes of McMurtry’s career, as well as having a very personal quality, and reflects the changes that had occurred in his houses since the antebellum period.”

John McMurtry’s plans for the Watkins House.

John McMurtry was the subject of noted architectural historian Clay Lancaster’s masters thesis at the University of Kentucky. Lancaster wrote of the late 19th century work of McCmurtry as “formal symmetry having been replaced by an easy irregularity of plan, monumentality having given way to intimacy—yet without remarkable reduction in overall size.” McMurtry, credited with popularizing the Gothic Revival style in Kentucky, worked his magic in this final family home, crafted for his family.

Fall 2019 façade.

McMurtry died in 1890. The list of his designs across Kentucky include the Clark County Courthouse, Floral Hall at the Red Mile Racetrack, the Thomas January House on West Second Street in Lexington, Loudoun House in Lexington, and the gatehouse at the Paris Cemetery in Paris, Kentucky – among many other notable buildings.

It’s no secret I loathe demolition of historic buildings that can be reused and could, with a little thought and imagination, continue to be useful, rathe than fodder for the landfill – my ire is even stronger for the wanton destruction of this building. South Broadway has been razed and rebuilt since the mid-20th century, and very little has been saved.

Location of the Thomas B. Watkins House (blue arrow) in Lexington, Kentucky.

Plywood and the Watkins House have melt before. In 1982, as the NRHP nomination was being written, the house stood shuttered and empty. But then, the dwelling was about to undergo restoration for use as an office.

Where is the foresight to once again save this remarkable building, a house designed specifically by a loving father for his daughter, and one of the last vestiges of the estates that once lined Broadway and Harrodsburg Road?

Watkins House, circa 1982. Photograph from the NRHP files.

The Thomas B. Watkins House once stood on a 40-acre parcel. That seems almost unthinkable now, but the solid masonry structure persevered throughout the tumult of development, road widening, and the expansion of Lexington. There is no need to consign it to the list of those lost treasures that preceded it. But as always, I imagine the lure of profit is stronger than the desire to keep the building standing for another 100 years.