Firefighter's Funeral

Tuesday afternoon I walked out of Bakery Square in Butchertown to find all Washington Street lined with fire trucks and police cars, all with lights flashing. Thinking some disaster had just occurred, I started taking pictures and tried to find out what was going on. As it turned out, I ran into a friend who's with the Florence, KY police department and he explained that a memorial service was taking place at St. Joseph Catholic Church for a well-loved firefighter, and they were giving him the full send-off in style.

Whiskey By The Drink

I love these old "Whiskey by the Drink" signs, from those bygone Don Draper days when women and television sets wore bunny ears. This one was sighted in Butchertown, at the corner of Mellwood and Brownsboro where it becomes Story Avenue.

View from Bakery Square

One from our high view department: a relatively high crow's-nest view looking down at Butchertown from the top of Bakery Square.

Edison's Medicine

Today is Thomas Edison's 164th birthday. I just saw him the other day and he doesn't look a day over 125.

As happens every year, the mainstream media spends the day giving a quickie overview of Edison's alleged accomplishments. This year I think it's time I played Devil's Advocate and present a differing view of history.

To be sure, Edison was a great man in his own twisted way and did achieve many things in his lifetime. But he owes many of his achievements to the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla invented the alternating current system of electricity that has become such a benchmark standard in America, people forget there could be any other kind.

But in 1882, it was not so. All our nation's electricity came from Edison's direct current system, and when Tesla popped up with the safer and superior alternating current, Edison - eager to protect his own interests - used every smear tactic at his disposal to generate negative PR for it. Edison paid local children to catch stray dogs and bring them to him (many people's pets were no doubt seized by these overeager kids). In showy circus-like press conferences and demonstrations, he would electrocute these poor dogs before everyone's eyes to "prove" the dangers of alternating current.

(In so doing, Edison stole credit for yet another invention: the electric chair. For his anti-Tesla dog-killing shows, he enlisted two of his employees - Harold P. Brown and Arthur Kennelly - to come up with the apparatus that would electrocute the puppies. Because Brown and Kennelly worked for Edison, and because Edison promoted the device as his own, the development of the electric chair still continues to be falsely credited to Edison in some publications to this day.)

Not satisfied with the pet executions, Edison upped the ante. On January 4, 1903, he arranged a public spectacle in which Topsy, an elephant from the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island's Luna Park, was electrocuted by Edison's lackies to demonstrate that Tesla's AC was so dangerous, it could kill an elephant. What the crowd of gawkers didn't know was that Edison had already arranged that Topsy be fed carrots laced with potassium cyanide, to ensure that she wouldn't live.

He made a film of the event, and showed it around the nation as part of his scare campaign against Tesla's AC.

Edison was not a terribly bright man when it came to science, and he could not even begin to wrap his head around how Tesla's mysterious alternating current worked. Says Wikipedia: "Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot be properly understood or exploited without a substantial understanding of mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla possessed."

Tesla had originally been working for Edison, but gradually came to realize that Edison was stealing his ideas and patenting them. The final straw was when Edison promised Tesla $50,000 if he could work the bugs out of Edison's inefficient dynamo. After a year of hard work, Tesla succeeded in improving the dynamo. When Tesla humbly showed up at Edison's office to inquire when he would receive his fifty grand, Edison reportedly shrugged and said: "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor".


Tesla and many other inventors had already invented the light bulb, or light bulb-like creations, long before Edison claimed credit for it and unveiled his own version in Kentucky at the Southern Exposition of 1883. If we regard the definition of a light bulb as "a vacuum tube that lights up", then consider the Geissler Tube, the Crookes Tube, and the works of Hiram Maxim.

It's generally accepted now that Joseph Wilson Swan is the actual inventor of Edison's bulb. Wikipedia again: "In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and started an advertising campaign which claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in Britain."

But really, it all goes back to Sir Humphrey Davy, who invented the first incandescent light in 1802, by passing direct electrical current through a thin strip of platinum. In 1809, Davy also created the first arc lamp by making a electrical connection between two carbon charcoal rods connected to a 2000-cell battery. But by the time American citizens flocked to Kentucky in 1883 to witness the unveiling of Edison's electric lights, history was ready to forget or ignore all who had come before.


Interestingly, years before the Expo, Edison had actually lived in Louisville circa 1866-1867. It's said he lived in a shotgun duplex on East Washington Street in what is now Butchertown. Today the Thomas Edison House operates in Butchertown as a museum and tribute to the man. However, it should be noted that there's actually no hard evidence that this house is the exact one that Mr. Edison lived in, even though the historical marker sign out front definitively states it as being so.

Skinmobile

Spotted this truck in Butchertown. I wonder if the "skin" tag (heh) was placed there deliberately by its owner, or if some vandal (excuse me, I mean "urban meme artist") just tagged it randomly.

Hopefully it's the former, in the tradition of graffiti vehicles like "Gold Teef", "GNAR", and "I Love Earth".

"Kamel" Graffiti Gang

Graffiti and vandalism have been a growing problem in Butchertown, and now four persons have been caught on security video vandalizing the Eye Care Institute building at 1536 Story Avenue. The "Kamel" gang are wanted by police for multiple counts of vandalism and criminal trespassing.


I'm of two minds regarding graffiti - on one hand, much of it is very beautiful and essentially harmless. On the other hand, some of it causes a lot of financial hardship for those whose homes and businesses have been vandalized by bored know-nothing teenage spray-painting retards. The problem will probably only continue to grow, unfortunately, and is doomed to be among that set of signs-of-the-times that I call Unsolvable Problems.


Click here for more details in my Louisville Mojo column.

"Truth and Justice" Statue

"Truth & Justice", a statue by Kentucky sculptor Barney Bright, will soon be on permanent display in a new outdoor space near the Miller Information Technology Center in Louisville. Broken Sidewalk is reporting that the statue has been restored by Barney's son Jeb, and has been in storage at his Butchertown foundry.

Abandoned Railroad Bridge Returns

The long-abandoned Big Four Railroad Bridge has been slated to be repurposed as a pedestrian walkway/bikeway, making travel between Louisville and Indiana fun.


When I first moved to Louisville several years ago, everyone was saying the pedestrian bridge in Butchertown was coming "any day now". After a couple of years I gave up on it, so it pleases me to see that they're finally making some progress on the construction of the on-ramp that will enable feet, bikes, and wheelchairs to make the trek across the Ohio River.

However, the trajectory of the on-ramp is such a wide one that simply getting to the bridge looks almost as long a journey as crossing the bridge itself. I was rather hoping for an elevator or something.

The Cult of Beer

I recently visited that peculiar, signless, "mystery bierhaus" in Butchertown, on the beat for Louisville Mojo, and filed a report on the idiosyncratic bar that seemed more like a secret society whose password I didn't know. (Maybe I should have said "Fidelio".) Click here to read the article!

Bill Fischer

If you don't know who Bill Fischer is, it's time you knew. Run, don't walk, to his historic home/studio at 1652 Story Avenue. Fischer is without a doubt the most accomplished of Butchertown's artists, with a body of work and achievement that spans decades. His works are all over the map, stylistically, and yet it is instantly recognizable. He has done many amazing murals for churches and synagogues, and to this day is kept busy with more offers than he has time for. His home is open for visitors by appointment: (502) 584-7947.


Some of Fischer's 1950s and 1960s works have the interesting distinction of having been painted with Jackson Pollock's paint. Pollock, avoiding the high costs of New York paint factories, ordered his paint in bulk from a Louisville manufacturer, carefully mixed to his exact peculiar specifications. When Pollock died unexpectedly in 1956, the manufacturer was stuck with a huge order of Pollock's paint that had been just about to ship. Fischer was called and offered to take the otherwise-unusable paint off their hands, to which he enthusiastically said yes.

Kentucky's Largest Cruvinet

You probably already knew the largest Cruvinet in the state can be found in Louisville's L&N Wine Bar & Bistro, at the corner of Mellwood and Story, right?

Whaddaya mean, "what's a Cruvinet?"

It's one of these things, in the picture, see. It's a giant thingamabob that has oodles of wine bottles attached to it, see. The Cruvinet Systems website says: "A Cruvinet temperature controlled system keeps wines as fresh as the momentthey are uncorked for up to six weeks, eliminating spoilage and waste. This system has revolutionized wine-by-the-glass sales and made wine bars possible. Cruvinet is the original wine preserving and dispensing system, used widely by international wine experts for effectively preserving, dispensing and merchandising fine varietal wines by the glass."

There seems to be something about Cruvinets that defy statistics. One website says L&N Wine Bar's holds 50 bottles, but another says 54, and yet another says it's "60+". I tried to research even bigger Cruvinets online and found a site that says Ristorante Panorama in PA has "the largest Cruvinet in the country". Then I found one that upped the ante even more and claims Ristorante Panorama's is the largest in the world.

Finally, I found a site that said that actually, Louisville's L&N Wine Bar has, in fact, the largest Cruvinet in the country!

Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read on the net. (Except my blogs, of course!) I chose to split the difference and accept that their Cruvinet is largest in the state, but need more convincing that it's biggest in the entire nation.

Club Premier

One from our Whitewashed Buildings and Vacant Stores blog:


I never went there, but I always loved the eye-poppingly orange diamond-patterned facade of Club Premier on Story Avenue in beautiful Butchertown. Prior to this, it had a good run as a lesbian bar called The Alternative. Originally, this was the historic Do Drop Inn way back in the day.

What will go here next, amid the grimy industrial edifices and the rotten odor of burning snouts and hooves wafting from the friendly neighborhood Swift plant? We shall see. Maybe I'll finally open my long-projected Voraxium house of sequined subversion here and put on our own hillbilly-flavored Grand Guignol shows.

The Heigold Facade

This is all that remains of the historic Heigold House in Butchertown, KY. The Heigold House was, in the 19th century, only one of many luxurious homes alongside this part of River Road, and the general area was known as "The Point".


In those days, this area was populated largely by wealthy French-speaking Cajuns from New Orleans who all chose to migrate here (not sure why). The Wikipedia has this to say:

Contemporary Louisville leaders of the time wanted the entire area depopulated and replaced with a park called Point Park Project, which was done to the extreme northern part of the area, now called Thruston Park. This remained the preferred urban public park throughout the 40's and 50's. The park was severely disrupted by the construction of I-64 in the early 60's and by the 80's, it was in a neglected and dismal state. The Harbor remained until it was closed by the city in 2005.

Today the only remaining structures are the decorated front facade of the Heigold House which was moved to its present location from the area of Frankfort Ave. and Padgett House, the last remaining of the riverfront mansions along Fulton St. Both are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Heigold facade has been placed in a roundabout on Frankfort Ave. near River Road, while the fate of the historic Padgett House remains uncertain.

Feral Kroger Sign

I chanced upon this massive discarded Kroger sign in a wooded area in Butchertown yesterday. I felt in awe of its enigmatic majesty, rather like the apes and astronauts who encountered the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Pigs at Vernon Lanes

Hey, we just drove by Vernon Lanes, a great old bowling alley in Butchertown, and just happened to see these stone pig figures newly mounted outside. Check out our old entry for The Frankfort Avenue Art House and note the pig in the back of the pickup truck and the pig amongst other stuff in the background - they're clearly the same pigs as these.