When we made plans more than a year ago to name a Person or Persons of the Year in Louisville, we suspended a bit of disbelief. How do you separate specific individuals and projects from the slow wash of history when, standing at the crest of the wave, that long advance can seem like a tsunami? There were, to be honest, two camps on this: those who worried that a choice would be nearly impossible to def/files/storyimages/because a number of noteworthy candidates should receive equal billing; and those who feared that, in a town that can be as slow-moving as ours, no names would emerge from the swell in 2006.
In the end, the task proved at once complex and simple. As with many big decisions — choices of a career or a home purchase or a life partner — it became an issue of searching for identity, in this case Louisville’s true self. As the city’s magazine, we’re charged with reflecting that personality every month, yet like so many individuals who make questionable calls in life, we don’t always see clearly who we are. The process of identifying our Persons of the Year became good therapy, for it demanded that we distill out the essence of our hometown until, as a group, editors and publisher became comfortable with our priorities.
I was initially attracted to the downtown arena, positing that final site selection and the piecing together of funding created the biggest coup for Louisville in ’06. Those of us who have been to major sports contests, concerts or other events at sparkling downtown palaces in places like Indianapolis, Nashville or St. Louis have experienced the vitality they can bring to the streets. And the image of this basketball-mad community finally being in the game to host regional NCAA men’s tournament competition for the first time since 1987 magnifies the excitement — whether you agree with the waterfront address or prefer the spurned Water Company property between Second and Third streets.
While I was building in my mind cases for arena proponents — even the controversial Arena Authority chair, Jim Host, a Lexingtonian, might be considered for his role in pulling together the dollars and the deal despite being a non-resident — others pointed to the sensational opening of the 21C Museum Hotel and ultra-ambitious plans to build a 61-story modern architecture monument nearby, Museum Plaza. The wife-husband team responsible for these injections of contemporary design into tradition-bound Louisville, Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, have created a buzz in the national media from urban-planning and travel writers. For giving staid Louisville a spark of progressiveness, Brown and Wilson scored a lot of points with our selection panel.
Other names were brought to the table (some are mentioned in our Persons of the Year feature beginning on page 42), but when discussions returned, as they did repeatedly, to the most lasting impact on the metro area, some simple truths began to emerge. Top among them, perhaps, is that Louisville means the most to us for its livability. Call it the comfort factor. What satisfies us is less about being wi-fi and more about being high-touch. Folks here not only have the time of day; they’re in no hurry to walk away after giving it.
For many Louisvillians, both natives and transplants, the symbols of our contented lifestyle, our oases of tranquility, are the Olmsted parks. Conceived in the last decade of the 19th century, these greenspaces leave indelible impressions on residents who make use of them either for active or passive pursuits. The generous acreage set aside in the late-1800s near the city’s then-blossoming original suburbs became Shawnee, Iroquois, Cherokee and several other parks that form links in a chain of common experience for those who have frequented them. We are a city that has not lost its sense of the natural world. In ways we may not comprehend, that helps keep us humble and it helps keep us whole.
Combine this realization with events in 2006 that have moved plans for a new ring of parks on soon-to-be-developed land from vision to reality and you may come to the same conclusion we did: The Persons of the Year are the two men most responsible for making it happen. Our story inside this issue outlines the vision, commitment and energies poured into a project that will establish at least 4,000 acres of parkland in various holdings along Floyds Fork Creek and link them by trails to Jefferson Forest and the Ohio River waterfront. It’s the chance to repeat for this city what the Olmsted designs did over a century ago. And it, all of us at the magazine agreed, has the potential to remake Louisville as . . . well, a greener copy of itself.
