Giant IOU

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:


As I've ranted in my blogs before, I'm of two minds on graffiti - having been both a graffiti artist and a property owner whose building was defaced by graffiti in my contradictory past, I take each example of this "art" on a case by case basis. I can't condone any graffiti that defaces someone's home, someone's place of business, or a historical structure. Especially when the work is really, really, really lame, such as this "IOU" tag is.

But I have to say, this one makes me scratch my head in wonderment: how the heck did they do that? It seems spray-painted but the letters are impossibly tall, and I don't think they dragged a scaffolding out there just to do this. I'm guessing they duct-taped the sprayer button down on a can tied to a long stick?

Otis Hidden

I was curious about the old Otis Hidden Company building in Portland, KY (West of Louisville), and did some Googling.


Turns out Mr. Hidden was in the business of Cabinet Hardware & Floor Coverings, both imported and manufactured, and they once had deluxe retail/office headquarters at 326 W. Main in Louisville, which is now the Hubbuch & Co. building next to Actors Theatre. The factory in Portland must have been for manufacturing and storage.



Mr. Hidden's name also turns up in some sort of legal squabble between a "Kentucky Furniture manufacturing Company" and the Masonic Savings Bank circa 1896, and a genealogy site mentions an Otis Hidden from California who married one Serena Fuqua. Could there have been more than one Otis Hidden? Evidently so, because here's another one who married a Judith Ladd and lived in Vermont.

Dangerous Pole

This utility pole in Portland, KY has been smashed nearly in two and is toppling dangerously, but continues to be allowed to remain in this state. Isn't someone concerned?

Consider the Cobblestones

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:


In downtown Louisville, under every street, the original cobblestone streets are hidden beneath a layer of pavement. And beneath those cobblestones is soil that has not been seen by the eyes of man since the mid-1800s.

Anything that someone chose to hide under a cobblestone in the 19th century, or buried in the ground even before the cobblestone streets were laid, has been hidden very well indeed for a long, long time.

Just you think on that.

Stolen Italian Icon Found at Speed Museum

Very interesting piece today from the New York Times about a painted gatefold icon that was stolen in Italy in 1971. 40 years after it vanished, it turned up in a dusty back storeroom of Louisville's Speed Museum.

The Speed's not to blame, though - they acquired the piece from a reputable gallery in New York for $38,000 in 1973, just two years after it had been purloined. How it got to that gallery is a matter that is still being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. (Seriously? Since when do they handle 1970s cold-case files of burglaries in Italy?)

According to the article:

Under a settlement negotiated by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and announced on Monday, the Speed will soon turn over the painting to Homeland Security, which will transfer it to Italian cultural authorities. (The collector who owned the painting in 1971 has since died, and the authorities will be responsible for determining who is entitled to it now.)

Before that, however, the museum will show the painting, which it has not exhibited for at least a decade, from June 9 to July 3 as part of a small exhibit that will, according to the museum’s director, Charles L. Venable, “contextualize it in a larger world of provenance research and repatriation of works of art.”

Storm, 5/23/2011

Two summers ago, I found myself caught in a spooky pre-tornadic storm as I made my way East on Shelbyville Road and then moved sideward to Westport. It happened all over again today.



Photographs rarely convey just how creepy some storms can be; though these examples aren't as dramatic looking as some of my other storm images, the knowledge that this was part of the same weather system that destroyed Joplin, MO gave me extra incentive to hustle home ASAP.

Genny's Diner

One from our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog:


Although I rarely ate there, Genny's Diner was a Louisville tradition and I will miss it. Their deep-fried "frickled" pickles were a unique local item which you don't see every day.

Owner Frank Faris, after years of battling with the city over his property next door, has been put out of business. Part of it is his own fault: he steadfastly refused to make ordered upkeep improvements to the home, despite court orders to do so. But I think Faris got a raw deal in the end: when he announced his intention to bulldoze the house to make more parking spaces for his diner, a group of concerned citizens got together and colluded to hurriedly designate the dump a "historic home", specifically so he couldn't do what he wanted to with his own property.

And when he still refused to cooperate, a judge ordered him to sell the house. And when he couldn't find a buyer, the judge actually ordered him to give it away for free. Can a judge really do that? Well, this one did, and I didn't hear many people squawking about it.

The way the whole thing turned out for Faris leaves a very unsavory taste in my mouth. It's true that his own behavior is why it all ended in drama and Faris' arrest, but I nevertheless sympathize with Faris for trying to conduct himself as if he was still living in an era when people were allowed to do what they wanted to with their own personal property. Those days are gone, and with their passing we've all lost something bigger than fried pickles.

A gourmet ice cream place called the Comfy Cow is slated to take over the Genny's Diner location. Ironically, they're going to bulldoze it and start over with a new building of their own.

Denunzio's Double Statues

Off the top of my noggin, I'm hard-pressed to think of another instance where I've seen a grave with two larger-than-life statues, one above the other on a second tier.


This is Joseph Denunzio in Louisville's St. Louis Cemetery; from the dignified pomp of his marker's presentation, you'd be easily led to assume this is the grave of the former mayor of Louisville who shares a similar name - but actually, this Joseph Denunzio was apparently an importer of fruits and vegetables, and they were related. He founded the Denunzio Fruit Company at 108 W. Jefferson Street, which continued to exist at least into the 1940s.


But according to John Kleber's Encyclopedia of Louisville, "his grave monument at Calvary Cemetery shows him in the pose of an auctioneer with produce at his feet." Waitaminute. This is St. Louis Cemetery, not Calvary, and I don't see any produce at his feet, Boss. What gives? Has Kleber made a typo (hey, it happens)? Or could this be our third Joseph Denunzio? This must be the guy, because he does look rather auctioneer-like, and he's clearly leaning against a stack of fruit crates.


The second statue in the stack is the traditional woman-with-anchor Statue of Hope, from the Catholic Virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity) which are in turn derived from 1 Corinthians 13:13:

And now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these three: but the chiefest of these is love.

I'm not sure how "love" and "charity" (caritas) got morphed into it along the way, because the actual original text says ἀγάπη, which is a concept unto itself and loses something in the translation. (ἀγάπη, or Agape, has been defined as "an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being" - in other words, outdoing negativity by throwing more positivity at it.)

Since the traditional Catholic representation of Charity sometimes depicts a woman with children gathering fruit, I would have thought that would have been a more appropriate choice for Louisville's premier fruit purveyor.

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.

John King

Last week, while meandering through St. Louis Cemetery in the Highlands of Louisville, I took a couple shots of this imposing grave marker with peculiar architecture. I just liked the look of it.

Tonight, just out of curiosity, I googled the fellow - John King from County Mayo, Ireland - and hit the motherlode. Even with geneaology sites on the web closing in the gaps on many family trees (thanks in large part to the Mormons and their jaw-droppingly complete historical archives in their Granite Mountain Records Vault), sometimes a search isn't very fruitful. But this time, a search brought up this page which tells us more than we could ever want to know about John King.

He married Kate Fox, who was also from County Mayo, Ireland. Then she died on December 28, 1884 and he soon remarried, to Anna Cain - who, interestingly, was also from County Mayo, Ireland.

He had five sons and one daughter. He worked for L&N railroad. He could not read or write but spoke English. In 1900 he lived at 1727 Tyler Avenue, and by 1902 he had moved to 1846 Todd, according to old city directories. At the time of his death due to Bright's Disease in 1924, he was living at 1847 Lytle Street.

John's son William went on to work for L&N railroad himself, lived at 608 31st Street and then 1304 Everett, married Caroline Theodora Droppelman, and died in 1965 at the age of 86 at Norton Hospital. He had Basilar artery thrumbosis from arteriosclerosis and prostate cancer. He attended St. Agnes Catholic Church and was buried at Calvary Cemetery.

John's son Joseph married Delia Burke (from County Mayo, Ireland!) and worked as a "day laborer'. He died in 1927 when he fell off the running board of a moving car.

John's son Timothy worked for a distillery and lived at 1757 Mellwood Avenue. He married an Irish woman named Bridget Haskin. He died of heart problems in 1927 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery.

John's son Patrick was a traveling salesman who married Margaret Agnes Kahoe. Though he lived to 1961, we actually have less data on him than his more short-lived brothers.

The timespace continuum gives me a weird shivery feeling sometimes.


None of this, however, tells me why John's grave is so darn cool looking.

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.

The AEGON Center

The tallest building in Kentucky is Louisville's AEGON Center, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, the architects who brought the world the Puerto de Europa, the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the Crystal Cathedral of Garden Grove, and the infamous Lipstick Building at NYC's even more infamous corner of 53rd and 3rd.


According to Wikipedia, "the building is constructed of reinforced concrete, as opposed to the steel construction usual for buildings of its height." Interesting. You may make of that what you will. It was completed in 1993, and has held up just fine since then.


Although you can't see it in the close-up photo above, there is a way to get the absolute top of the building by way of a secured ladder-tower leading from the center of the dome's interior, going up to the pinnacle.

There's a photograph of it here on the official U.S. Coast Guard flickr site. I'd love to get up there and take some photos myself.

Sandy's Hamburgers

Tonight I've been doing a little research for my proposed fifteen-volume encyclopedic work What Used To Be Where, Back In The Day (and you thought I was joking about that, didn't you?)

In the course of my studies, I just happened across a delightful web page devoted to the long-since-departed Sandy's Restaurant in Louisville. Sandy's, apparently a Scottish-themed burger joint, had a girl in a kilt and a plaid beret for their mascot and served a specialty burger called a "Big Scott". They operated one location in Paducah and three locations in Louisville. Of the Louisville stands, one was at 5009 South Third St. (pictured above in a photograph taken on October 16, 1971) another was at 1007 W. Broadway, and the other was at 1420 Poplar Level Road. The Paducah stand was at 1726 Broadway.


There's nothing like a gang of retro-obsessive hunter-gatherer archivists to restore my faith in the human condition. These people are hardcore serious about reconstructing the lost memory of Sandy's for posterity, as it should be. Here's an example from their site to illustrate their zeal:

"The 1968 Sandy's locations list shows one of these locations as a possible 1967 opening. The 1973 list shows Poplar Level Road as Sandy's #317 and 3rd Street as #318 which points to a 1973 opening. Perhaps these locations were rebuilt as the new mini or maxi Sandy's restaurants as some locations were switching to the new buildout at this time and maybe they were renumbered into the 300 range at that time.

Robby Delius shows yet another scenario by providing both the 1965 and 1969 city directory listings for Louisville which shows Poplar Level and S. Third Street as being in existence in 1965 as well as 1969!"

We need more people like this in America.

And it gets better. It turns out that this lovingly detailed paean to preserving memorabilia related to the Sandy's of Louisville is actually just one page among many in a greater effort to hoard photos, menus, and even signage from every Sandy's restaurant that ever existed on Earth. It could take two hours to absorb it all, and if you're as much a card-carrying member of the Society For The Preservation Of Everything as I am, then you will devote those two hours to this holy work.


But wait, there's more!

Sandy's is just the tip o' the iceberg - that link is actually just one small fraction of Captain Ernie's Showboat, a truly leviathan site that assiduously sniffs out all available effluvia regarding a whole raft of obscure and neglected stuff from our collective childhood of the Midwest - everything from Romper Room to Cactus Jim to the Davenport, Iowa Morning Farm Report!

Life is good.

The Kilowatt Kid

Cruised by the Frankfort Avenue Art House the other day and spied a new addition to his menagerie: an antique standup of Reddy Kilowatt, inexplicably in Western gear.

Storm, 4/4/2011

Was out wandering in the woods again this morning and a storm started blowing in.

I thought I'd better skidoo since I'd heard reports of the potential for tornadic weather; plus I knew storms and high winds during the night had already knocked out power in parts of downtown and Butchertown.

But I scurried home for nothing - the storm was extremely fast-moving and the dark clouds had already vamoosed to Owsley County by the time I made it back to my car. It's still super-windy out there at the moment, though, so we're not out of the woods yet. So to speak.

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.

Mosques of Kentucky

Some of the most interesting buildings in America come from the tradition of Islamic Architecture, and Kentucky's no exception. Pictured above is the Masjid Al-Farooq in Prestonsburg, and below are further examples:


Islamic Center, Elizabethtown.


Muslim Community Center, Louisville.


Islamic Center, Somerset.


Islamic Center, Bowling Green.


Bosniak-American Islamic Center, Louisville. (A typical quaint country home, but with a Minaret!)

The Johnson Family

And speaking of William Burroughs (which we were in the previous post), if you've read him (and I'm going to assume you have because that's just the kind of solipsist I am) then this grave in Louisville's Eastern Cemetery probably would make you do a double-take, too. (And maybe also if you're a Days of our Lives fan!)

Paul K's first band in Lexington, The Johnsons, were so named as an homage to Burroughs.

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.