Ramble Round Town #3

Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games. Locals here just call it Old Louisville though. Fun place, spent more time there than anywhere else in Louisville. If I had to sum it up in one photo, it'd be this first one of the friendly neighborhood liquor store with the bars on the windows and all the merchandise inside behind bulletproof glass. The dude rolling the blunt on the side stoop just completes the vibe.

I think plywood and broken windows are the STDs of historic preservation districts. Old Louisville is the largest preservation district in the US for Victorian architecture, which is nice to boast about but tends to make maintaining and repairing the buildings an expensive proposition. When that gets neglected they tend to break out in a bad case of plywood and it has a nasty habit of being rather persistent.

It's a bit surreal, you'll have a couple houses all boarded up and broken into and then just a few doors down the houses are worth a million bucks or more. The shot above only has three or four houses separating it from the boarded up ones in the previous photo.

I've heard that about this man. If it's on a bumper sticker you know it must be true. The neighborhood is a nice mix of old money, no money, and everything in between. More on the no money end of the scale, at least when I lived there.

Had to look at this side of a church out my bedroom window for years, now it's your turn. Also one of the more dangerous places to park on a Friday night. There's a stop sign on the other side of the street that sometimes turns invisible once the liquor starts to flow.

Some of y'all may have caught me going on about places around town getting #magbarred. Well, this is the Mag Bar. Nobody's quite sure how or why but the place has a sweet siren song that only passing traffic can hear. Naturally, when the city spontaneously adopted driving vehicles into buildings as the local sport we had to verb it and call it 'getting magbarred.'

Scheler's, the finest Stop'N'Rob in the whole damn city. Where else can you play keno and argue with Baptist missionaries at 10 am on a Tuesday?

Was living here in 2011-2012, when heroin hit Louisville for real. At the time I had a neighbor that was fresh off 25 years in the federal penitentiary for holding up a post office. He'd gotten out and discovered crack, took to smoking that and lifting weights, and I have never seen anyone in their late 50s that ripped. Heroin came calling and I have never seen someone melt like he did, a nearly unrecognizable thin and frail old man in just a matter of months. Don't know what happened to him but I did see a news story about the SWAT team extracting him after he'd taken his girlfriend hostage, so I feel like he may have managed to find his way back to the cocaine.

Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here everyday. Felt sorry for the guy on the step, he was trying to roll a blunt but he really wasn't working with much. Then again, this corner of the neighborhood has a very 'just scraping by' feel to it. Used to live a couple hundred feet from where the guy is sitting, we were doing good to keep the lights on. Didn't seem that bad to us at the time, we had a halfway house next door and that does wonders to put things in perspective.

Give a hand or two for Aunt Bee's Laundry! First choice for doing laundry in the neighborhood. Only choice too. Lived half a cigarette away, so I'd just walk and do my laundry on smoke breaks.

It's always a bit jarring to be looking at all these brick, three story structures from the late 1800s and then see a classic Cold War Blahs tower for warehousing old people jutting up in the background. Do they warehouse old folks where you live?

Spring is when the neighborhood really blooms.