See something enough, no matter how shocking, and you become inured to it. It’s just how we’re wired to survive: adaptive, nimble, ever assimilating one experience into the one to come. So it is that the verb “magbarred” has broadly entered Louisville’s lexicon. Once reserved for the epidemic of traffic violence delivered to the doorstep of Old Louisville’s timeless dive bar, it has now, as any good neologism is wont to do, grown legs and begun strolling around town. The vehicular desecration that bisected Heart & Soy’s storefront? Magbarred. The 1-2 punch of sedans that Silver Dollar took on an otherwise quiet afternoon last summer? Magbarred. The, and I quote another local news source here, “gaping hole” left in the Beechmont Arby’s with the classic cowboy hat sign out front? Magbarred. I could go on and on, which of course is part of the point.
One of the more troubling episodes in a long string of magbarring incidents that took place at the corner of 26th and Market in the Portland neighborhood. In what has now become a locally viral set of images, one can see a late model Kia Sorrento with its snout buried in the building’s corner entrance like a truffle pig trained to sniff out cheap cellular options. The “boost” in the Boost Mobile sign across the building’s facade hangs vertically, held only by its last, lower-case letter: a tragedy dressed as a crossword puzzle. This is a historic brick building, and its bricks, which from one photo’s angle are seen stacked in walls of the customary 3 brick thickness, have been violently unzipped from the point of impact to a terminus high above, so high that the third floor’s joists are visible. The wound itself is an inverted staircase. It’s an Escher drawing that takes your eyes on a ride up and then back down to where the errant vehicle’s roof is concave beneath the weight of hundreds of units of kiln-fired clay, blocks that sat contentedly in an almost Buddhist stillness for the past 150 years and now lay scattered alongside insulation and glass and other bits of the building’s spilled guts.
If that sounded a bit like an elegy, it’s because it is one. In interviews with witnesses who experienced the accident from within the Boost Mobile store, there was a common, and important, refrain: We’re so lucky that no one was seriously injured, which is what really matters anyway. This of course is true; life is sacred, things can be replaced. It also feels important to note that in less than a week the entire building would be razed, adding another blank space to a neighborhood of blank spaces. In Sanborn Fire Insurance maps dating to 1906, the structure was one of four buildings packed tightly at the northeast corner of the intersection, all of which are now lost to time.
Portland resident Michael Weinert, himself an owner of a historic building in the area, recalls frequenting the place in the mid-80s when it was still a bar called The Cavalier Club. Weinert is a quintessential river man who begins work on barges long before dawn and has a habit of rubbing the surface of whatever’s in front of him as he speaks, as if measuring the texture of things helps to measure out his own words. The bar, he says, had the feel of a local watering hole but with an overarching air of heritage and history that came from the sophisticated woodwork and a glass storefront that featured an ornate display case from whatever it had been in a previous life. As much as we as people are keeper of histories, our places hold stories too. When we lose these places, we lose the context of the events and lives that made them what they were, the lives that made them places at all.
I like to think of these historic structures as the most important stitches in the big quilt that is our urban landscape; they hold things together and help connect one piece to the other. But not just that, they also connect one era to the next. In the parts of the city where we still have a significant density of them, such as Whiskey Row and the East Market District, they’re beautiful and revered and have been given new leases on life by recent investment. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these buildings used to be *everywhere* in our city, and if you don’t believe me just peruse UofL’s photo archives sometime. Urban renewal was devastating to our city’s core, and we still have not come close to recovering from it. In Louisville, our most divested neighborhoods are often our most historic ones, and their buildings share the same history and architectural significance as those found anywhere else. But they’re very much under threat from irreversible neglect, fires, and, increasingly, traffic incidents like the one mentioned above. The same inequality that delivers vastly different livelihood outcomes by zip code shows up in our care for the built environment, too.
The United States is experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of traffic violence. In 2022, pedestrian deaths rose to a 40-year high, claiming 7,522 lives, up a troubling 57% in the last decade alone. This not a global trend; the US is unique in the industrialized world when it comes to this rise. Even as hybrid and remote work means that Americans are driving fewer miles on average, they’re somehow dying on roads more often. These tragic facts are the logical conclusion of many decades of the prioritization of the personal automobile and the ability of persons in those automobiles to travel at dangerously high speeds wherever and whenever possible. Everything about our present infrastructure facilitates that “freedom”. We decided cities were places to drive through rather than places to live, and how it now feels to live in them is reflective of that choice.
In a recent talk organized by UofL’s Urban Design Studio at the Louisville Free Public Library’s main branch, renowned planner and walkability guru Jeff Speck delivered an informal, ad hoc assessment of how traffic calming might save Louisville’s faltering urban core. Speck’s principles are simple: re-engineering our cities from car-centric to human-centric results in desirable economic, health, and environmental outcomes. By calming traffic and making cities walkable, we’re more prosperous, healthier, and put less stress on our natural environment, and Speck has the data to back up his claims.
What I’d like to suggest is that, in addition to the benefits above, traffic calming is also a fundamentally preservationist act. As local urban designer Patrick Piuma pointed out, "our historic structures are most vulnerable to traffic violence because they were built close to curbs at a time that often pre-dates automobiles altogether." This proximity is important, as we know that having buildings close to our streets encourages walking by creating the principle of enclosure, in addition to the other elements of Speck’s Theory of Walkability: utility, safety, comfort, and interest. The irony here is that the structures we need most to encourage pedestrianism are also the ones most under threat by our present car-and-speed-centric designs.
On my own daily commute to the local YMCA I pass Zion Baptist Church, a stunning house of worship at the southwest corner of 22nd and Muhammad Ali. This is a church that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s younger brother, A.D. Williams King, up until the elder’s assassination in 1968, a church that in 1956 became the first interracial congregation in Kentucky since slavery, and that has occupied that corner in stately and soulful fashion since 1927. After having the corner entrance to their sanctuary damaged too many times to count, the church has been forced to install a series of 7 steel bollards and 3 heavy concrete planters to guard against reckless vehicles. The planters are fairly new, and as of a couple weeks ago they’ve also been badly damaged by the speeds that the one-way streets that hem them in encourage.
Another example of magbarring that needs to be highlighted is the case of Renshoku Ramen. On the first Friday in June, on an unseasonably temperate evening in which restaurants were just beginning to fill with their end-of-week crowds, a car came barreling eastbound down Oak Street. Bystanders guessed it was traveling upwards of 70 mph, a speed brought abruptly to a halt after it collided with a street tree on the sidewalk right at the entrance to Renshoku. The car immediately burst into flames. We’re often told that such instantaneous fireballs are the work of stuntman pyrotechnics and don’t happen in real life, but unless this scene was part of some covert application of Kentucky’s revived film tax credit, these images courtesy of World Travels Fast Louisville sure seem to be a Hollywood chase brought to life.
The restaurant’s evening rush was evacuated as fire crews did their best to mitigate an extremely precarious scene. When the smoke finally cleared, the building had been badly damaged by the fire, the impacted tree looked like skyward-reaching charcoal, and a promising small business had been dealt yet another frustrating setback. The building that houses Renshoku isn’t as historic as some of the others we’ve mentioned, but it’s still from the mid 20th century, and has a lot of charm and function as a mixed-use unit, providing important storefronts for local businesses and vital housing by way of a series of studio apartments on its second floor. The building will be saved, but not before a lot of needless displacement and economic anguish for those that most deserve our support.
We should be inspired to protect our historic buildings because they’re beautiful. We should also protect them because they’re ultimately what make our “someplace” distinguishable from “anyplace”. More than any other feature of the built environment, they give our city character and persona, and we’re never building their equal again. Even the most abandoned, overlooked historic structures among us involve craftsmanship and materials that can’t be replicated, whether it be the intricate brick corbelling, the old-growth wooden beams, or the lime plaster held fast by delicate hairs of so many horses long-since turned ghosts. Our city should invest aggressively in re-wiring the entire motherboard of our traffic systems, and in the process, the habits of our drivers and the outcomes of our traffic. This is a change from which we have everything to gain and, if left undone, so much to lose, including our treasured historic landmarks and the further hollowing of our urban core. In doing so, we’ll preserve these windows into the past for future generations and do justice to the lives that brought them into being and sustained them for so many decades before.
Image Top: What is left of the building at 26th and Market in the Portland neighborhood after a vehicle "magbarred" it earlier this year.
The views expressed here in the Field Notes by our guest commentators are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UofL Urban Design Studio.
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