Louisville to guide makeover of Park Hill
A major blueprint for industry, housing is under way

By Marcus Green
 

If you are a current or former resident of the area, operate a business or work there, is needed to improve it tell us what you think in our forums.

Not far from Jeralene Frazier's tidy, two-story brick house on Kentucky Street are ghosts of the neighborhood's better days -- boarded-up buildings and vacant lots where homes once stood.

"When I moved in, both sides of the street had housing," said Frazier, a 63-year-old housekeeper who has lived in the California neighborhood for 27 years. "And now there's lots of empty lots."

The landscape across California, Algonquin, Park Hill and other western Louisville neighborhoods is a mosaic of progress and decline. An empty factory sits next to public housing units. Stores have gone out of business, but new companies are moving in and others plan to expand.

For more than a year, an effort to redevelop one of the city's most distressed areas -- taking in parts of the California, Algonquin and Park Hill neighborhoods -- has been driven largely by town hall meetings and weekend planning sessions.

But now the city is beginning a comprehensive plan to chart the future of the area it refers to as Park Hill.

The plan includes:

A $300,000 master plan for mixing housing and industry.

A $62,500 study addressing ways to improve transportation in an area with dead-end streets, large industrial tracts and railroad tracks.

A $200,000 market analysis that will guide the master plan.

"All roads lead to Park Hill if you look at a map. It's where our industrial history is. It's close to transportation," said Lauren Heberle, a University of Louisville researcher. "It is in need of attention because of high poverty, isolated residential neighborhoods within that."

Metro Mayor Jerry Abramson said the Park Hill area could be "a potentially great redevelopment area."

"It's near downtown, on two rail lines, near the interstates. Plus, it has relatively inexpensive land and is minutes from the airport."

DeVone Holt, who heads economic development in western Louisville for Greater Louisville Inc., the metro chamber of commerce, said officials constantly lobby companies on the area's advantages.

"They see this as a potential risk investment," Holt said, "but the risk is lessened if we have an understanding of where the community is going."

The question interested businesses want answered, Holt said, is simple: "What's the plan for this?"

Potential seen

The area being studied includes the Park Hill neighborhood, but its boundaries extend much farther -- Broadway on the north and Algonquin Parkway to the south, Seventh Street to the east and 22nd Street to the west.

Its population is largely African American and poor, according to the 2000 Census.

The area was selected for the master plan because of its potential for redevelopment identified in a 2001 report by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a Boston-based nonprofit organization.

Since then, the city has funded Holt's position at Greater Louisville Inc. In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the city, U of L and the Center for Neighborhoods a three-year grant to begin the public planning process.

"They picked a spot that has been forgotten," said Jacquelyn Grace-Lee, a resident organizing coordinator for the Center for Neighborhoods, a group that trains neighborhood leaders.

It's a spot that also has been abandoned by large employers, leaving sprawling, possibly contaminated sites called "brownfields" dotting the neighborhoods.

The former Rhodia Inc. chemical plant at 11th and Hill streets has been vacant since 1993. Philip Morris quit producing cigarettes at its Broadway factory in 2000. American Standard stopped making bathroom fixtures at a plant at Seventh Street and Shipp Avenue in 1992.

Already there have been ongoing efforts to revitalize the area, such as rehabilitating a 17-acre tract where Rhodia once stood.

"There's sort of this sense of the area being in transition" away from heavy manufacturing, said Susan Hamilton, an assistant director of the metro government economic development department.

The Rhodia site, now owned by the city, is being cleared and will be marketed for interested businesses later this year, said Chris Poynter, an Abramson spokesman.

Contamination on the site was cleaned through a joint agreement between metro government and Rhodia, Hamilton said. Nearly all of the structures on the site will be razed, although officials hope to salvage an art deco office building.

Overall, city officials say 42 companies have invested $190 million and created more than 1,000 jobs over the past four years by expanding or moving to the western part of the city, including the Park Hill area.

Nova Group, the parent company of nail maker Great Northern Manufacturing, last year bought a warehouse at 15th and Breckinridge streets and moved its operations there from Bluegrass Industrial Park in eastern Jefferson County.

Co-owner Neville Blakemore said the move was driven in part by cheaper real estate costs, and the company had outgrown its 25,000 square-foot facility in the East End. The new space is about four times larger.

"If our business strategy takes us to a different part of the community that enables us to then reinvest -- fantastic," Blakemore said. "The business strategy is the driver."

Last week, Heaven Hill Distilleries announced plans to expand its plant at 17th and Breckinridge, an estimated $3.9 million investment that would create 15 jobs. The company now employs 34 people at the distillery.

The expansion shows the company's commitment to the area, said Heaven Hill president Max L. Shapira. He expects some of the new jobs, which range from high-technology to maintenance positions, could be filled by area residents.

Housing an anchor

The master plan will be funded by Rhodia as part of an agreement with the city, Poynter said. The Kentuckiana Regional Planning and Development Agency is paying for the transportation study, while a $100,000 matching grant from the federal Economic Development Agency will cover the market analysis.

The master plan also will consider housing opportunities, including how to encourage private developers to invest in the area.

Developer Bill Weyland, whose projects include Glassworks and The Henry Clay building downtown, said he has long been a supporter of a plan for redeveloping the Park Hill area. Weyland's City Properties Group is marketing the old American Standard building.

That building, which dates from the 1920s, reminds Weyland of Glassworks on West Market Street. "I think it's got a great mixed-use opportunity" that includes retail and housing, he said.

In workshops held over the past year, some of the ideas proposed for the neighborhoods include an urban organic farm modeled after a similar project in Philadelphia and a community center with job-training classes.

Frazier, one of the workshops' attendees, said it won't take much to restore the appearance of her neighborhood.

"I just feel like if there were more businesses or housing or recreation … it would look a lot better," she said.

Grace-Lee said she has been encouraged by the participation among different groups during the planning process for the study area.

"They're reaching out to different residents and companies and businesses and getting everyone involved," she said. "So it's not like a few businesspeople have a voice -- but the residents as well."

Reporter Marcus Green can be reached at (502) 582-4675.

If you are a current or former resident of the area, operate a business or work there, tell us what you think is needed to improve it.