23. OLD LOUISVILLE

Louisville, Kentucky

9/25/2009

Old Louisville prides itself on being the third-largest historic district in the United States. In our previous trips I’ve made sure I’ve done my research on these “wander through old neighborhoods looking at houses” destinations so we knew what highlights to search for, but since this trip was such a last-minute thing, we set my beloved GPS to send us to the Old Louisville visitor center and hoped they would send us in the right direction. The ladies working there were very friendly, but not particularly helpful. They gave us a map of the historic district, which is a very slick looking document, but only provides a tourist with street names. It was useless to us since it provided no information on any of the historic buildings or even where they were located. To compare, when we visited Madison, Indiana we were provided with a map that marked the locations of significant buildings and some information on their history.

This is not to say that historic Louisville was a bust. It is a beautiful town, and while exploring we did see many beautiful old homes of various architectural styles. (It seems many of them have been transformed into student housing.) Still, I would have liked to have been able to know exactly what we were looking at.

It was quite muggy that evening, and after wandering around for awhile in search of someplace to get a drink (again, our useless map not much help) we came upon a place called the Third Avenue Café. I had forgotten that this place was specifically mentioned in Schultz’ book as a highlight of Old Louisville – it was only a coincidence that we happened to go inside. A waitress tried to give us some menus, but we explained that we only wanted to get something to drink. She seemed annoyed and when we approached the bar area she and two other employees all tried to get each other to serve us. Supposedly, it’s a coffee shop, but when one of the employees finally decided to be the one to help us, he had difficulty making our iced mochas. After about ten minutes, we finally got our very watery drinks.