Observations
5:02 Chat: Buildings We’d Save or Tear Down
Here’s an edited excerpt you can listen to from a conversation I had with local developer Andy Blieden, about a Louisville building his family knows well — a building that lots of us in the group that answers our weekly questions said we’d help tear down/save.
5:02 — five minutes and two seconds from the 502:
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been putting together a growing group of us in Louisville to answer weekly questions, including these two:
What Louisville building, if destined for demolition, would you bring a sledgehammer to help knock down?
And what Louisville building, if destined for demolition, would you stand in front of a wrecking ball for?
(Would love to know how you’d answer too. Lemme know: josh@louisville.com)
The list of the buildings we’d bring a sledgehammer to help knock down didn’t really surprise me: the pork-processing plant in Butchertown (can you smell it?), the exclusive Pendennis Club, Fourth Street Live! (exclamation point theirs), “the bathroom in Bingham Park in Clifton,” the long-empty Urban Government Center (demolished last year in the redeveloping Paristown neighborhood).
And the list was long (though also not all that surprising) of the places we’d stand in front of the wrecking ball for…
The Palace
So many libraries
Old Louisville’s Victorian homes
Actors Theatre
Ali’s childhood home in Parkland
The Twin Spires
Seelbach and Brown hotels
Speed Art Museum
Clay tennis courts at Chickasaw Park
Water Tower
But something I wasn’t expecting was how one building in particular kept appearing on both lists.
The one that so many of us would bring a sledgehammer to help knock down/stand in front of the wrecking ball for was —
(care to guess?)
— Kaden Tower.
(More recently, the building, on Dutchmans Lane near the Watterson, has been called Wright Tower — a nod to its history tied to Frank Lloyd Wright — and was purchased last month for $12 million by Texas Roadhouse.)
Here’s just some of what our group had to say about the building…
What building, if destined for demolition, would you bring a sledgehammer to help knock down?
“Kaden Tower is absolutely hideous and the most aggressive eyesore. I’ve despised the sight of that monstrosity my entire life. It’s a blight upon the landscape.”
“Like a horribly designed wedding cake.”
“Unfortunately, I live near Dutchmans Lane and have to pass by every day. What…is…it?”
And what building, if destined for demolition, would you stand in front of a wrecking ball for?
“So odd it is beautiful.”
“Love the kitsch architecture.”
“I photographed many iconic buildings in the city during the height of the pandemic. Sunrise pics of Kaden Tower revealed at least three distinctive colors of the exterior within a 15-minute sunrise. The changing light truly exposed the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright.”
“I like to call it ‘the pink monster in the white petticoat’ — but she’s kind of grown on me.”
To talk about all of this — this building both loathed and loved — I hopped on a Zoom call with the local developer Andy Blieden, whom you might best know for his Butchertown Market project. His family knows the tower well. It opened in 1966 as the headquarters for Lincoln Income Life Insurance Co., and Blieden’s family co-owned it for years, beginning in the mid-1980s. The two families were Karp and Blieden. Karp + Blieden = Kaden.
What he shared on our call had me wishing more local developers would take architectural risks.
(That’s Andy on the left, me on the right.)
Andy: “The building is based on concepts and drawings from Frank Lloyd Wright (who died in 1959), but his son-in-law and protégé, William Wesley Peters, did it and finished it. So it was more inspired by Wright but not technically his deal.”
Me: “And you were telling me you got to go to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home?”
Andy: “We got to go to Taliesin, one of his homes, in Wisconsin and stayed at the main house. I stayed at the main house at Taliesin — like a religious experience. We also went to Taliesin in Scottsdale, Arizona. At the one in Wisconsin, I stayed in a room that had a set of the china he designed for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and I could have, like, stuffed a butter plate in my pants and it’s like worth 15,000 bucks. And I thought about it. I thought about stuffing a butter plate in my pants. There was a little footstool that he designed. And I thought about stealing it. But I didn’t. But I thought about it.”
Me: “You were only like four or five years old, a little kid, when that tower went up. What are your earliest memories of it?”
Andy: “We used to drive by the building at Christmas to see it lit up because it lit up like a lantern. They used to put colored plastic gels in the windows, and they would have a Christmas tree on one side, a Christmas ornament and like a dreidel. And people that were in the building hated it because they would have blue light coming in.”
Me: “When I read you all of those comments from our group about the building, what were you thinking?”
Andy: “It totally makes sense that it’s both hated and reviled but also loved. Even the way it was built: It was cantilevered and built like a suspension bridge, so it is definitely bold.
“You know, people called it ‘the Doily Building’ and ‘the Pink Building,’ and we kinda wanted to get away from the pink color, so we wanted William Wesley Peters to design a new color. And we’re like, ‘We want you to redo the furniture and the fabrics and stuff and look at the lighting, but you gotta watch your costs.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Mr. Wright used to talk about having clients like you. Mr. Wright used to say, Oh, damn the expenses, give the canary another f—— seed.’”
Me: “Wait, you said you wanted to get away from the pink color. So what was the new color he gave you?”
Andy: “We went through like eight iterations of the color after we told him we didn’t want pink. After all was said and done — it took like four months — he would only let us choose salmon, which was pink. It was pink. F—— pink.”
Make it Louisville. Even if some people think it’s bad, have a personality, do something different.
— local developer Andy Blieden
Me: “How do you describe the building to people now?”
Andy: “I love the building. It is a work of art. It is inspired. Sometimes you hit and sometimes you miss, but the sin is not trying.
“I always applaud people in Louisville who are willing to take a risk and go out on a limb and be bold — even if I don’t agree with what they’re doing. We need more people taking risks and taking shots. Because Louisville is so conservative; it is wild. Louisville suffers from analysis paralysis. But it’s easier to stand out in that environment when you’re doing something that’s a little risky. It looks a lot risky because it’s Louisville.
“Any time I do something, I wanna make it — I want to twist it or do something creative. Doesn’t necessarily cost more than doing something not creative. Get rid of this homogenous just shit that is Anywhere, U.S.A. That’s not who and what we are. You know, skin your knee, fail. Make it Louisville. Even if some people think it’s bad, have a personality, do something different.”
Me: “That last thing you said, in a way it was almost like you were describing Kaden Tower.”
Andy: [Laughs.] “Right?!”
Me: “OK, so now I’ve gotta ask you: What Louisville building, if destined for demolition, would you stand in front of a wrecking ball for?”
Andy: “I love Jack Fry’s. I wouldn’t want it torn down.”
Me: “And what Louisville building, if destined for demolition, would you bring a sledgehammer to help knock down?”
Andy: “I would tear down the modern house at [address on well-known Louisville street]. I think that is it. It pisses me off every time I go by it. Which is every day. It just ruins the street.”