Starting in 2012, the nine CycLOUvia events have attracted tens of thousands to neighborhoods across the city for festivals temporarily cleared of vehicles. The next one will be Sunday, Aug. 7, from 2-6 p.m on Goss Avenue, Logan Street, and Shelby Street in Germantown, Schnitzelburg, and Shelby Park — also known as Three Points. Previous CycLOUvias were on Bardstown Road, West Broadway and Frankfort Avenue.
Photo, top: a rider at CycLOUVia on Frankfort in April 2015, Louisville Cycle Chic.
The Germantown Mill Lofts website is full of even more amazing pictures of the new 185-unit complex, now nearing completion by Underhill Associates at 946 Goss Ave. Apartments range from studios to one- and two-bedrooms. All are equipped with washers and dryers. Many feature floor-to-ceiling windows (photo, top) that flood apartments with natural light. Amenities include a swimming pool, a gym (now under construction) and the new Finn’s Southern Kitchen restaurant.
Options and prices:
The lofts occupy what was once Kentucky’s biggest cotton mill, consisting of more than 250,000 square feet of beautiful brick buildings spread over nearly eight acres in the heart of Germantown and Schnitzelburg. Finn’s was built inside what was once the mill’s administrative office.
Here’s what the Louisville Textile Mill looked like in 1937, in this University of Louisville Photographic Archives photo. In the foreground, that’s a cobblestone Goss Avenue, spliced by trolley tracks.
Our favorite shiny sheet scribe, Carla Sue Broecker of The Voice-Tribune, continues her overseas dispatches from Merry Old England, giving Boulevard another opportunity to post photos of real estate porn stately country houses we’d like to visit, too!
This week’s entry is Chatsworth House — “home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, set in Derbyshire’s magnificent Peak District. One of Britain’s greatest historic homes offers beautiful rooms, famous works of art, a 105-acre formal garden, farmyard and enough deer to feed all of Jefferson County!”
Yikes! That’s a lot of venison. We’d need 6,200 for all the county’s residents — plus Martha Stewart’s Roasted rack of venison with red currant and cranberry sauce. (Confidential to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and the TSA: better check Carla’s steamer trunks on the way back home!)
Chatsworth (photo, top) hasn’t remained standing all these 463 years through the efforts of serfs alone. Now, it requires day visitors and brides who put the “d” in destination weddings. The house is open through Nov. 4 this year. Tickets are £23 for adults ($33.50 at current exchange rates). For £40 a ticket ($58), you’ll also get a traditional afternoon British tea. (“Homemade dainty finger sandwiches of smoked salmon and cream cheese, roasted ham and wholegrain mustard, free-range egg mayonnaise and cress and cucumber and mature cheese, plus cakes and pastries.”)
Jane Austen featured Chatsworth in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it stood in for Fitzwilliam Darcy’s Pemberley in the 2005 film adaptation starring Keira Knightly (swoon!) and Matthew Macfadyen (double-swoon!). Let’s watch:
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife saw the value of their stocks, cash and other investments climb last year, cementing his status as one of the wealthiest U.S. senators, his new financial disclosure report shows. But the source of his riches — via his wife Elaine Chao‘s immigrant father — also demonstrates the fine line the senate majority leader must walk in supporting the GOP’s presumptive White House nominee: Donald Trump.
Senators make the finance reports public each year, valuing investments according to a predetermined range. In 2015, his portfolio was worth $9.6 million to $43.2 million, according to a new Boulevard analysis. On the low side, that was a 2% increase from 2014. On the high side: a whopping 23%.
The vast majority of McConnell’s wealth is held by his economist wife, Chao (photo with senator, top), whose father made a shipping trade fortune. Chao, 63, was U.S. labor secretary during the George W. Bush Administration.
Boulevard examined the senator’s latest report, filed May 16, to arrive at his 2015 estimates. The midpoint of their values would be $26.4 million vs. $22.2 million in 2014, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group in Washington that tracks political campaign finance. The center hasn’t published estimates for 2015 yet.
But in 2014, it ranked McConnell the 11th richest senator. No. 1: Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, with an average net worth of $243 million — a fortune he built investing in telecommunications. Here are the 25 richest.
Chao’s parents fled to Taiwan from mainland China when the Chinese Communists seized power in 1949, according to Wikipedia. In 1961, when she was eight years old, Chao immigrated to the U.S. on a freighter with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship. He later went on to launch shipper Foremost Group.
McConnell has offered tepid support to Trump at best, citing his inflammatory anti-immigration postures. In an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric Tuesday, McConnell said the New York billionaire’s proposals could threaten the GOP’s standing with immigrant voters. “America is changing,” he told Couric, “the Republican Party clearly doesn’t need to write off either Asian or Latino Americans, and that is not a good place to be for long-term competitiveness.”
Related: Here’s McConnell’s report from last year, plus his 2014 report for comparison. And here’s Sen. Rand Paul’s new report, plus his 2014 report.
Boulevard reports extensively on executive pay at big local employers. But we also look at what folks make in the trenches — and in the slammer. This is from a recent ad in Craigslist’s etcetera help-wanted section in Louisville.
The job: halfway house corrections officer.
The duties: You’ll work at Community Transitional Services, a private Louisville halfway house under contract with the state Department of Corrections where paroled inmates land first after prison. Corrections officers count heads, monitor resident behavior, conduct searches for contraband, including drugs and alcohol surveillance, etc. (Boulevard worries about what “etcetera” might include.)
If this weren’t enticing enough, consider the wonderful work schedule: Full-time positions involve 12-hour shifts starting at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., three and four days weekly, alternating days every other week, with every other weekend off. Got that?
To qualify, applicants need a GED or high school diploma; a valid driver’s license, and a clean criminal background check (duh). Individuals on supervised parole needn’t apply (double-duh).
Private lockups everywhere have a troubled history, and this place is no exception. Near the corner of 15th and Jefferson streets in the Russell community, CTS lost 329 offenders in 2013, when WDRB examined its history; nearly 1,000 had fled illegally since 2010. The company charged the state $31.61 per inmate daily, or $7,081 per day when the TV station visited. It’s had the corrections department contract since 2009.
Did we mention residents’ complaints about being sexually abused? In 2014, they lodged abuse allegations seven times; just two incidents were substantiated, according to the most recent report made public under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. None of them involved CTS staff, according to the report, which didn’t identify the offenders.
What it pays: $9.25 a hour, or $17,316 to $23,088 a year, depending on the number of days worked weekly.
Photo, top: Actor Matt McGorry as Corrections Officer John Bennet in Netflix’s dark comedy series Orange is the New Black, about a for-profit women’s prison. Here’s the trailer for season four, which starts June 17:
It’s now OK to wear white pants, cool off with abanicos — and binge on the ice cream we spotted Sunday at a Frosty Treats truck at the annual Willow Park Summer Concert Series. Cherokee Triangle street festivals are the go-to place for frozen treats: Steel City Pops was doing big business at last month’s Cherokee Art Fair, selling $3 craft popsicles from its new store at 1021 Bardstown Road; those are balsamic strawberry ones in the photo, top.
Ice cream street vendors have been around a long time, dating to the 19th century and advances in technology and sanitation, says Town & Country magazine. This summer, however, competition is igniting violent turf wars, according to this hair-raiser in yesterday’s New York Times.
That’s why we long for more genteel times in Louisville — like 1933, and this ice cream booth at the Kentucky State Fair from the University of Louisville’s Photographic Archives:
Boulevard 