Louisville’s New Outdoor Living Room

By Mike Kimmel and Patti Clare

Only a generation ago, Louisville, Kentucky, residents effectively turned their backs on the waterfront, abandoning it to low-level uses such as junkyards and scrap metal operations. At the time, the decision to construct a six-lane, elevated interstate highway that cut the city off from the river failed to raise concerns — simply because the community could not envision a better use for the riverfront land.

Today, a scant 20 years later, that same land is transformed into an urban park on the edge of Louisville’s downtown, designed by Hargreaves Associates. Waterfront Park has become the outdoor living room for residents of all ages, races and neighborhoods. An estimated 1.25 million visitors a year come to the park for concerts, fireworks shows and festivals, or just to visit its playgrounds, scenic walkways and fountains. The Slugger Field baseball stadium drew an average of 668,000 paid admissions in its first two seasons.

The park and the stadium rejuvenated the entire waterfront of the city — spawning millions of dollars of private sector investment in the renovation and rehabbing of nearby buildings and increasing the number of employees and residents in the area. Before the project, approximately 200 employees worked on the site in jobs such as heavy equipment operators, laborers, caretakers, office workers and managers. Now, more than 5,000 skilled and professional workers have jobs in the immediate vicinity of the park — from executives to baseball players to horse-and-carriage drivers.

A river walk winds from the park westward along the river. A new condominium high-rise was built by the river and a nationally-acclaimed outdoor skate park opened in 2002.

Environmental Challenges
Building Waterfront Park and Slugger Field required the acquisition and remediation of 72 acres along the Ohio River — 54 acres for the park and 18 acres for the stadium.