5/17/2023 0 Comments Formz create a sidewalk![]() ![]() A Kroger grocery still keeps the neighborhood supplied with food. Some older commercial buildings have been renovated for private and academic use. Since 2007, several missing teeth around Second and Breckinridge streets have been infilled in with housing for the Louisville Family Scholar House, the Center for Women & Families, and with a dormitory for Spalding. Today, most of SoBro’s grand mansions are gone, but the neighborhood still clings to its mixed-use heritage of proud housing and commercial space. ![]() Spalding University’s new dormitory at Second and Breckinridge streets. “As a result, it has become a ‘placeless’ no-man’s-land that interrupts the connection between Downtown and Old Louisville/Limerick.” SoBro shows signs of life. “The lack of architectural cohesion and the absence of continuity in urban form create a vortex effect for the SoBro neighborhood,” its neighborhood plan continues. The university also plans to convert a former used car lot at Second and Kentucky streets into a grassy play field for its students. And Spalding has been trying to counter the plague of asphalt with fields and trees, most notably with the creation of Mother Catherine Spalding Square near the heart of its campus. “There’s the joke that we’re the giant parking lot between Downtown and Old Louisville,” McClure said. Earlier this year, the neighborhood was named the country’s worst “Parking Crater” in a national competition held by New York–based Streetsblog. Over the course of the next half century, SoBro would take on a reputation more for its barren parking lots than its historic architecture. “Seemingly overnight, the neighborhood south of Broadway would go from being a handsome Victorian-era neighborhood to an amorphous commercial and tenement district,” the neighborhood plan reads. During this transition, the wealthy continued south to Old Louisville and old mansions were quickly converted into apartments and rooming houses. New businesses, including many of the city’s first car dealerships, converted or demolished housing for commercial use, the neighborhood plan continued. This push south also brought with it the neighborhood’s eventual decline. The neighborhood was first developed following the Civil War as a residential enclave of Louisville’s top families, but according to the 2007 SoBro neighborhood plan, it was quickly changing with a greater mix of residents and commercial uses spilling over from Downtown. Shortly after the turn of the century when the Puritan Uniform Rental building was built, SoBro was undergoing distinct transition. The site of the Puritan Building in the larger context of SoBro. After the floodwaters of 1937 inundated the area, the Benzole company went bankrupt, and by 1939, Puritan Cleaners was listed at the site, formally incorporated in 1941 at 206 West Breckinridge Street. The site has operated as a cleaner almost consistently throughout its life. Inside the Puritan Uniform Rental building. And walking around the interior today, it’s clear that this building was built to last. According to a report in the journal Domestic Engineering from that year, the 30-foot-by-200-foot plant was built of fire-proof brick and concrete at a cost of $5,500, or about $103,300 today. That structure was completed in 1917 under direction of architect Oscar Reuter 1. The L-shaped parcel containing the Puritan Building. Plans for the Puritan Building date back to October 1914 when the Benzole Garment Cleaning Company, headquartered at Third and Chestnut streets Downtown, announced they would build a new plant at the site, previously a residence. “They did all the habits for the sisters who were working in the area, and they did all the linens for the residence hall.” The structure has roots within the community. “The dry cleaners actually did a lot of work for the Sisters of Charity,” Spalding President Tori Murden McClure told Broken Sidewalk on a tour of the property last week. Last fall, the structure was acquired by Spalding University with plans for its demolition.įor Spalding, the building has become an eyesore that makes attracting students more difficult, but for a neighborhood already beset with surface parking lots, the building means a lot more. Puritan Uniform Rental’s simple yellow lettering above its doorway at 206–208 West Breckinridge Street near Second Street has long been a fixture of SoBro, playing off the building’s signature brick color.īut since the business closed several years ago and the passing of Puritan owner Ernest Carl Bowen, Jr., in 2014, that orange edifice began to collect dirt and grime. A sturdy, orange-brick building has been keeping SoBro clean for almost a century. ![]()
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