Photos of Louisville - Highland Park #1

What's New? - Another former Highland Park resident is putting together a web site on the history of the old neighborhood.

In the late 1980s the City of Louisville purchased up and later demolished all the homes and businesses in the Highland Park, Standiford, and Prestonia neighborhoods for airport expansion.

While Louisville International Airport did get realigned with twin runways, as of late 2000 only a small portion of the empty land in Highland Park is being used for airport-related businesses.

This page is a snapshot of what the area once occupied by the Highland Park neighborhood now looks like. These photos were taken on 23 November 2000 near the intersection of Ottawa Avenue and Park Boulevard in the remains of the Highland Park neighborhood of Louisville. More photos taken on 26 November 2000 are available on the Highland Park #2 page.

My family lived at a worn old shotgun house on 320 Wawa Avenue until our house got bought. We since moved to a bigger house in the Portland neighborhood. My mother doesn't want to see these photos since she's heartbroken about the whole thing.

Much of the land where houses got bought up and torn down is currently not being used for anything. It's almost maddening to think that a bunch of houses were bought out and torn down 5-10 years ago and a majority of the land is not being used for anything.

In this area you will still see cars drive by occasionally, and every once in a while you'll see someone (probably homeless) walking around. Other than taking shortcuts, going to or from a job, or driving around seeing what the old neighborhood looks like now, I'm curious as to what these people are doing around these parts.

To my knowledge this is a list of streets that are still open:

• The entire length of Park Boulevard. Portions south of Wawa Avenue are now known as Old Park Boulevard (as indiciated by one sign) or Tug Road (as indicated by at least two maps I own). Wawa Avenue east of Park Boulevard is now known as Park Boulevard. The intersection of Wawa and Park was realigned.
• Schweirmann Avenue from (formerly) Wawa to Adair Street.
• Adair Street from Schweirmann to Crittenden Drive.
• Dakota Avenue from Park Boulevard to eastern Louisville Avenue.
• Most of the eastern Louisville Avenue is open.
• Ottawa Avenue west of Park Boulevard.
• Hiawatha Avenue west of Park Boulevard.
• The Woodlawn Overpass, Nevada Avenue, and Woodlawn Avenue.
• Wabasso Avenue also remains open, and some businesses in the area are still there. Other than that, no bulildings remain.

#036	(1024×768 JPG, 234928 bytes)	Park Boulevard, now known as ``New Park Boulevard'', looking north from Ottawa Avenue. I-264 is in the background. The blockaded street is Southern Heights Avenue.
#037	(1024×768 JPG, 235010 bytes)	Park Boulevard looking south towards Ottawa Avenue. The barracades block what used to be an alley. Highland Park had a great network of alleys! There used to be a traffic light at this intersection. I don't know what the blue artifact in the center of this photo is.
#038	(1024×768 JPG, 333132 bytes)	Looking northwest from Park and Ottawa. These trees once stood in peoples' yards!
#039	(1024×768 JPG, 197274 bytes)	This is Ottawa Avenue west of Park Boulevard. This photo is looking southwest. A dentist's office, I beileve, used to stand at the northeast corner of the alley and Ottawa.
#040	(1024×768 JPG, 218899 bytes)	Park Boulevard, looking north from Ottawa.
#041	(1024×768 JPG, 177194 bytes)	Looking west from under the Watterson Expressway. On the left you see a pedestrian walkway passing over the CSX railroad tracks that was built a few years before the process started to buy out this neighborhood.

Related Sites

• Another former Highland Park resident is putting together a web site on the history of the old neighborhood.

• A Place in Time: The story of Louisville's neighborhoods is a book published by the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1989 featuring profiles of various Louisville neighborhoods. The contents of the book are online, and include a piece on Highland Park.

• Bryan Hurst and the Lolligaggers: Not Waiting for Favors is a Louisville Music News article about ``I Went to Sleep on Erie'', a song about a woman who lived on Erie Avenue who woke up one morning finding her street name had changed to Southern Heights. Unfortunately, the song is not available on the Bryan Hurst CD.

• A History of the L&N South Louisville Shops - One of the major employers of Highland Park residents was the South Louisville Shops, a repair facility for L&N's railroad cars. The South Louisville Shops disappeared in the 1980s when CSX bought the Seaboard System, which purchased L&N a few years before that. The shops were completely torn down to make way for the Papa John's Cardinal Stadium and possibly some other businesses.

• Bill Allison, currently on the City of Louisville Board of Aldermen, was the head of the law firm that represented the neighborhood associations of Highland Park, Standiford, and Prestonia in challenging the Regional Airport Authority's use of urban renewal powers to take the private property in those neighborhoods for commercial airport-related development. The Kentucky Supreme Court declared that the Airport Authority's actions were illegal and unconstitutionally arbitrary. Peruse His biography for more info.

• Communities, Inc. v. Busey, 956 F.2d 619 (United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, 1992)

• Louisville Railway Company streetcar #776 at the Highland Park Loop

• TerraServer photos of the current neighborhood. At press time (30-Nov-2000) the left-hand-side of this view was taken in 1998, and the right-hand side was taken in 1996.