This route through the Skycrest neighborhood was my first in 40504 in some time. Since altering my focus to concentrate on areas inside New Circle, I’ve spent a lot of time walking through neighborhoods in 40502 and 40508 and these areas each have unique feel. 40504 does as well, and it was refreshing to come back to it after a long layoff. This route concentrated on three streets, Lynn, Della and Cheryl, right where they meet Harrodsburg. These are long streets, with modest Cape Cod style houses and plenty of mature trees. I was surprised by how quiet things were here given the proximity of Harrodsburg Road. There wasn’t much that was especially notable here, just a quiet neighborhood where people were starting to put up Christmas decorations.
Tag Archives: Harrodsburg
Day 67-Written in Concrete
It’s hard to fix mistakes written in concrete. I came across the words “No More” scrawled in relatively fresh concrete in the drive way of some new structures along Mitchell and behind Harrodsburg near Lane Allen, a 1950’s era commercial district undergoing significant change. One wonders…no more what? Is this a response to the buildings, the construction itself–no more McDonald’s? Or to something else, a protest against police brutality or a complaint about algebra homework? The mystery is tantalizing, and should grow as it gets older.
Jack White of the Raconteurs sings “You wrote our names down on the sidewalk/then the rain came and washed ’em off/So we should write ’em again on wet cement/so maybe people a long time from now will know what we meant.” And while he wasn’t talking about streets and buildings, it’s interesting to try to put that meaning to it. The messages we put in concrete today, in the form of roads and buildings, will be with us for generations. Walking through this 1950’s neighborhood, it’s tough not to think about how society’s preferences–choices made 60 years ago–are reflected in the streetscape, and wonder what the new structures say about us.
Day 49-Going by slow
A song from a band called Poi Dog Pondering captured my attention a long time ago with a song about walking even when other alternatives were available. The song’s conclusion, that “you get to know things better/when they go by slow,” has been among the motivators for this project. Today’s walk was along a stretch of one of Lexington’s spoke arterials, Harrodsburg Road, which takes traffic from downtown to Jessamine county, Nicholasville and points beyond. This particular stretch is not slow; there aren’t many reasons to slow down. There are a few feeder routes into neighborhoods and a shopping district at the corner of Man O’ War and Harrodsburg, but none of these have ever drawn significant enough traffic to slow down this drive.
It’s not, at the first glance, a terribly exciting route, but it’s the first in what I expect will be a series of trips down arterials that are necessitated by low density of connected feeder routes along them. That is, in many cases it is difficult to find an efficient loop that would be short enough for me to walk. Compare this to my routes along Winchester Road, a similar spoke arterial, but one that intersects smaller streets much more frequently. At any rate, planning this route was a little like making sure there was some broccoli on the menu.
The potential payoff was really from watching it go by at three miles per hour instead of 55. And I did see a few things I wouldn’t have otherwise, including, hidden among the trees, a large mansion built in 1851. The wooded areas on either side provide might provide some adventure for the right people, ambitious kids or geocachers, maybe and there were a couple of other unusual properties as well. Would I walk this stretch of Harrodsburg again? Probably not, but sometimes you do things just so you can say you did it.
What works: This stretch of road is good at what it does.
What doesn’t (for my purposes, anyway): What it does has nothing to do with people travelling on foot.