220. 7th Street North of Main - Closed Effective November 5

The housing situation and market in downtown Louisville has undergone and is undergoing significant change, getting a jump start during the administration of the last Mayor of the old City of Louisville, the Hon. Dave Armstrong. And nearly all of it has been a very positive change. I am among those who have moved to the downtown area during that time.

Most of the housing has been in buildings whose previous uses have long since passed. So the change has been welcome. Along the Waterfront, a complete renaissance has taken place over the last twenty years, with new parks, new homes, and new businesses, although we still have no place to go buy a new dress shirt, nor is a Kroger anywhere within a reasonable walk.

What hasn't changed much is the historic nature of the buildings and the lands being used to re-form what downtown Louisville actually looks like. And that is good.

That changes this morning with the closing of Seventh Street north of Main. The reason for the closure is the building of what will be Louisville's signature building on the Ohio, our signature feature at our location in the Republic. The new Museum Plaza will be 61 stories tall when completed. It will be located at N. 7th Street and W. Washington Street, which was legally closed last week. It will be juxtaposed upon I-64, much like the Muhammad Ali Museum and the future downtown arena are. And it will replace in its path Fort Nelson Park, which marks the founding of Louisville by George Rogers Clark in 1778, and the later building of Fort Nelson by Richard Chenoweth, the second of the Forts-On-Shore built to replace the original Corn Island fort, along the Left Bank of the Ohio River near Milepost 606.

The samll park, with its obelisk is the traditional site for the very genesis of our city here on the river. Somewhere in the park is a time-capsule, planted in the 1970s to be opened in the 2070s. Among the names written on the large concrete hole is mine. Mayor Harvey Sloane presided over the planting of the capsule and those of us in attendance signed our names on the wall into which the capusle was planted.

The original plan for Louisville was a series of streets running away from the river to the south, streets now numbered 1st to 9th, along with others running parallel to the river, streets now named Washington, Main, Market, and Jefferson. The city's south side ran along the alley south of Jefferson, then known as Green Street and now known as Liberty Street. That was the extent of downtown. Imagine the current location of the Court House looking southward into a vast area of trees and fields and standing water in Grayson's Pond, along where the Romano L. Mazzoli Federal Building now stands on Dr. Martin Luther King Place.

It is worth marking that today, with the closing of Seventh Street North of Main, a part of Louisville's history, its very origins, are being lost to progress, the never-ceasing March of Time along Louisville's historic place on one of America's great inland highways, the Ohio River.