If a fellow Louisvillian asks me where I live, the short and easy answer is "Crescent Hill." While that’s accurate as far as official neighborhood boundaries go, the reality is a bit more complicated.
When Louisville Magazine editor Bruce Allar asked me to write about my neighborhood to kick off what we hope will become a regular magazine feature, I started by thinking of all the things I do regularly that are within walking or quick-driving distance from my home, which led to marking some spots on a map and surrounding them with a boundary line.
Voila! I now know that my real neighborhood is St. Cherokee Crescent Matthews Gardens Hill. Let’s just shorten that to St. Cherescent Hill.
The home where my wife and I — and a couple of children and more animals than I care to count — have lived for 24 years is in the Stilz subdivision, just east of the Southern Baptist Seminary between Lexington Road and Grinstead Drive, so named because it was developed (in the 1920s) on land owned by early-20th-century farmer and vegetable gardener Godfrey Stilz.
But our true neighborhood — the area where we shop for necessities, walk the dogs and ride our bikes — is an amorphous blob with appendages extending southward to Seneca and Cherokee parks, eastward to St. Matthews and north and westward to Frankfort Avenue.
If I had to choose one defining attraction of my neighborhood it would be: greenspace. Not only are we surrounded by three city parks (Seneca, Cherokee and Crescent Hill), but we also use and enjoy the open spaces of the Baptist Seminary, Ursuline Campus and the Louisville Water Company.
The openness and variety of landscapes makes our neighborhood a dog-walker’s paradise. Annabelle, our three-year-old Lab, and Pablo, our beaglish mutt puppy, can choose between the joys of the splash-in-Beargrass-Creek parks route, the chase-the-tennis-ball trek to the Ursuline Campus or the Baptist Seminary’s Josephus Commons, or the beg-for-food-and-attention perambulation past Frankfort Avenue eateries.
After more than two decades of exploring this wider neighborhood, I find that I have come to cherish certain locales with special fondness. Here are a few of my favorite St. Cherescent Hill places:
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Ursuline Campus — The Southern Baptists and the Roman Catholics may have their theological differences, but to those of us who live in the neighborhood, their campuses are equally attractive mini-parks used for dog walking, bike riding, rollerblading and contemplative strolling.
SBTS is like a well-manicured estate with immaculate grounds and handsomely classic architecture, and has some of the quietest and best-behaved college students (most of them graduate-level) you would ever want as neighbors. Its central quadrangle, known as the Josephus Commons, is a favorite tennis-ball chasing grounds for our aptly named Labrador retriever.
The Ursuline Campus grounds, home to Sacred Heart High School and Model School and Ursuline Montessori, has become something of an athletic beehive in recent years, with the addition of track-and-field facilities, tennis courts, and baseball and soccer fields. But it’s still a great place to walk and ride bikes. Both of our daughters learned to cycle on the campus’s parking lots and roads (and one of them provided us with an indelible memory by knocking out two teeth in a bike crash near a large oak tree that we still call "Nora’s tree").
Seneca and Cherokee Parks — They’re the crown jewels of my extended neighborhood. Several times a week, in good weather, I ride my bike on a nine-mile personal "time trial" that starts alongside the traffic light at the intersection of Garden Drive and Lexington Road, winds through both parks and finishes at that same traffic light. From Seneca’s tennis courts, walking path and playing fields to Cherokee’s forests and "Dog Hill" — what’s not to love about these civic gems? OK, I thought of one thing: Please, please, Mr. Mayor (a fellow St. Cherescentian, I might add), put a fresh coat of asphalt down on the park road that runs next to Beargrass Creek, which probably has more bicycle and foot traffic per mile than any other road in Louisville. The potholes are getting close to dangerous in a couple of stretches.
The "Heart of St. Matthews" — Frankfort Avenue’s great for eating and drinking, but for the down-to-earth daily shopping rounds there’s no beating St. Matthews. It’s where we bank, pick up prescriptions, take the dogs to the vet, get our hair cut and the lawnmower sharpened.
My personal most-often-visited St. Matthews establishments, in no particular order, are Stan’s Fish Sandwich (I’ve been ordering their fish sandwich on Fridays so regularly that now I just call up, give my name and say "the usual"), Bicycle Sport, MacTown, Xavier Nally’s barber shop (ask for a post-haircut shoulder massage), Top Hat Liquors (special kudos for the snazzy new neon sign — and be sure to keep stocking that Fuller’s ESB), Paul’s Fruit Market, Graeter’s Ice Cream and St. Matthews Hardware.
Frankfort Avenue — When we first moved to the neighborhood, Frankfort Avenue was, to put it nicely, a throwback. It had loads of unrealized charm, but not a lot of vitality. In those days, the best food on the avenue was the Marthaburger at the late, lamented Hudson’s Market. Then, along came Lynn and Bim. That would be Lynn Winter and Bim Deitrich, whose Lynn’s Paradise Cafe (originally located at the corner of Clifton and Frankfort avenues) and Deitrich’s in the Crescent started the area’s restaurant explosion. Now, of course, Frankfort Avenue rivals Bardstown Road as the city’s most intriguing restaurant row (although Lynn’s has since moved on to Barret Avenue and Dietrich’s has closed).
The section of Frankfort Avenue that I lay claim to as part of my personal neighborhood is the stretch between roughly Hite and Stilz avenues, home to family favorites Heine Brothers’ Coffee, Carmichael’s Bookstore, Fitness on Frankfort, Blue Dog Bakery and — sadly, a soon-to-be defector (moving later this summer to Mellwood Avenue) — Mom’s Music, where I pick up the occasional set of guitar strings.
And although I can’t say as I’ve ever shopped there personally, Pablo and Annabelle would be upset if I didn’t mention the S. Bayly Boutique, on South Bayly Avenue near Frankfort, whose proprietor keeps a dish of water and a birdbath full of dog biscuits handy for any passing canines.
Now that’s downright neighborly.
