The Bluegrass and Beyond

Robin Sither, brewmaster at West Sixth Street Brewery, cleans tanks. The brewery and taproom, which opened April 1, are located in part of a former Rainbo bread factory at the corner of West Sixth and Jefferson streets. Photos by Tom Eblen

Last week was American Craft Beer Week, so I thought it would be a good time for an update on three brewpubs that have opened in Lexington this year.

Better still, Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop was having a fund-raiser, a “bicycle progressive dinner” where a sold-out crowd of 70 people would pedal to all three brewpubs in one evening.

So — purely in the interest of journalistic research, of course — I signed up. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.

The popularity of local and unique food and drink has exploded. Wineries, boutique distilleries and craft breweries have sprung up everywhere. Lexington’s new brewpubs will soon be joined by at least two more, one downtown on Short Street and a second in Chevy Chase. And don’t forget Alltech, which has been brewing Kentucky Ale downtown for a decade.

While Americans’ beer consumption has declined slightly during the past 30 years, the number of small, independent breweries has risen from a handful to about 2,000, according to the Brewers Association. Still, they account for less than 6 percent of total U.S. beer sales, indicating a lot of room for growth.

Craft breweries, microbreweries and brewpubs are gaining popularity for many reasons: they are popular local hangouts; they support local economies and engender regional pride; and, most of all, their brews taste better than industrial beer.

The first stop on our two-wheeled tour was Lexington Beerworks, which opened Jan. 13 in a renovated old building at 213 North Limestone. The company’s three partners — Mike Vincent, Greg Leimer and Jason Wolf — are Lexmark marketing guys. They wanted a side business to indulge their home-brewing hobby and introduce others to making and appreciating craft beer.

Lexington Beerworks

Lexington Beerworks serves craft beers from around the country, sells home-brewing supplies and offers twice-monthly home-brewing classes. Unlike the other two brewpubs, they don’t make significant amounts of beer on premises.

Vincent said the place is designed for craft beer geeks and novices. The most popular item is a flight of four samples of different beers for $6.

“We try to recommend beers that people will like, and if they do like them, hopefully they’ll come back,” he said. “So far, we’ve done better than we expected.”

After a couple of samples and appetizers from Fork in the Road Food Truck, our group pedaled over to Chair Avenue, off South Broadway, to a concrete-block building that used to house batting cages. It is now home to Country Boy Brewing.

This small brewery was started on a shoestring by three Kentucky country boys who wanted to take their home-brewing hobby to the next level. Jeff Beagle, Daniel Harrison and Evan Coppage make small batches of seriously good beer, which they serve in a bar on site.

They have made 17 different recipes, 11 of which are on tap now. “We’re not afraid to experiment,” Harrison said. “People have been appreciative of the riskiness of what we’re trying to do. Business has been great.”

The country boys now have enough equipment to make eight barrels a week, but that will increase to 12 in June. When production capacity can outstrip demand at the bar, they plan to find a retail distributor, Beagle said.

After a couple of samples and a big slice of Goodfellas’ outstanding pizza, we pedaled back to where we started the ride: West Sixth Brewing, at West Sixth and Jefferson streets, for two beer samples and desserts from Two Birds Bakery in Midway.

West Sixth was launched April 1 by Ben Self, Joe Kuosman, Brady Barlow and Robin Sither. The brewery, which is housed in one corner of a former Rainbo Bread bakery, makes all of its beer on premises at the rate of 45 barrels a week.

Daniel Harrison, right, of Country Boy Brewing.

There are now six beers on tap, following introduction of a premium double IPA last week. “The taproom has given us a place to experiment and see what people like,” Self said.

A seventh beer — an Imperial Stout — will debut in a couple of weeks. West Sixth’s flagship IPA also is sold at the brewery in cans and growler jugs. Clark Distributing will begin this week making cans available at retail locations around Central Kentucky.

“We’ve been much busier than we could have imagined,” Self said. In addition to making money, the partners also want to give back to the community. They plan to donate 6 percent of net profits to local charities, support local organizations and be an example of environmental responsibility.

How many brewpubs can Lexington support before the market is tapped out? None of these entrepreneurs knows, but they see no sign of it happening any time soon.

If you go

Lexington Beerworks

Where: 213 N. Limestone

Hours: 1-11 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 1 p.m.-midnight Fri., 11 a.m.-midnight Sat., noon-11 p.m. Sun.

Learn more: (859) 359-6747, Lexingtonbeerworks.com

Country Boy Brewing

Where: 436 Chair Ave.

Hours: 4-10 p.m. Mon.-Wed.; 4 p.m.-midnight Thu., Fri.; noon-midnight Sat. Closed Sun.

Learn more: (859) 554-6200, Countryboybrewing.com

West Sixth Brewing

Where: 501 W. Sixth St.

Hours: 3-10 p.m. Mon.-Thu.; noon-midnight Fri., Sat.;, 1-6 p.m. Sun.

Learn more: (859) 951-6006, Westsixth.com

Donna Pelfrey, the Morgan County Circuit Court clerk, moved her office to a room in a Morehead State University extension campus building outside West Liberty. She expects to be there for at least two years. Photos by Tom Eblen

WEST LIBERTY — I first met Donna Pelfrey, the Morgan County Circuit Court clerk, on March 6. She was standing in a debris-strewn street outside her demolished office, having just gotten a hug from Kentucky Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr.

A tornado had blown through town four evenings earlier, killing six people and demolishing everything in its path.

Pelfrey and state Administrative Office of the Courts employees had made their way into town the day after the storm to secure records in the office vault. When I met them, they were moving them to a temporary courthouse just outside town.

Pelfrey has been clerk for a dozen years and was deputy clerk for 24 years before that. Now, faced with the biggest disaster to ever strike her hometown, she was scrambling to help restore order. It was a family affair: her husband, Rick Pelfrey, outside plant manager for Mountain Telephone, was working night and day to restore cell-phone and land-line service to the county.

I returned last week, 75 days after the tornado, to see how recovery efforts were going. I figured Donna Pelfrey would be a good person to ask.

I found her in the temporary courthouse, a Morehead State University extension campus classroom building. It is in the nearby community of Index, which has become the new nerve center of a Morgan County on the mend.

The building’s auditorium is both a makeshift courtroom and church, depending on the day of the week. Various agencies and businesses are upstairs and in the Regional Enterprise Center next door. West Liberty Elementary School is in a former industrial building at the top of the hill.

Pelphrey and her six assistants work in a big, windowless room of the MSU building, where they expect to be for at least two years. A new judicial center was being built next to the century-old courthouse where they worked when the tornado hit. Work is stalled while structural engineers assess the damage.

Much of the past 75 days has been a blur, Pelfrey said. She considers herself lucky: Her immediate family was unhurt, and her home was only slightly damaged. Still, the tornado killed a cousin and a woman she had worked with for 25 years. Her sister’s home was demolished. “That kind of stuff has been hard to deal with,” she said.

Pelfrey hears a lot from people who come into the clerk’s office every day. “What I hear more than anything is people having insurance trouble,” she said. “They’re fussing about their insurance, and adjusters, and they can’t get what they need.”

Some still seem traumatized. “They have a lot of stories to tell,” she said.

They talk of having impulsively taken shelter in a certain corner of their home — the only corner left standing when their house collapsed. Then there was the woman who, seeing the tornado coming, tried to take shelter in the Family Dollar store. The door was locked, so she clutched the rails of the shopping cart corral as hard as she could to keep from being blown away.

Only once in our conversation did Pelfrey come close to tears. That was when she recalled all of the strangers who have poured into West Liberty since May 2 to help clean up, or who have sent clothing and supplies for her neighbors in need.

“When you saw church buses and truckloads of people volunteering their time, that was the most surprising thing,” she said. A roofing company from another town went from house to house, putting tarps on damaged roofs for free.

Pelfrey said she hasn’t heard any reports of scam artist repairmen who often show up in towns after disasters. She said she knows of only two or three people who were charged with looting.

Cleanup and reconstruction have put a lot of people back to work, but the future remains uncertain. Pelfrey says she thinks it will be at least two years before West Liberty returns to anything approaching normal.

The restoration of Salyer Cemetery, where monuments were flattened, has boosted people’s spirits, she said. The pizza restaurant is supposed to reopen this week, and there is a sign on Main Street saying the Chinese restaurant will return soon.

There’s no word yet on the fate of Freezer Fresh Dairy, which for years was West Liberty’s most popular hangout. There are doubts about whether some downtown businesses, which were struggling before the storm, will ever come back.

After weeks of waiting for insurance settlements, demolition and reconstruction work is now under way along Main Street, which makes Pelfrey’s daily commute through town a little more encouraging.

“Every time you see something come back, it lifts your spirits,” she said.

Kentucky Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. comforts Morgan Circuit Court Clerk Donna Pelfrey on March 6 in tornado-damaged  West Liberty. Behind Minton is Justice Will T. Scott. Both the unfinished new justice center at left and the county courthouse where Pelfrey’s office was located were heavily damaged.

Like most buildings on West Liberty’s Main Street, this one is “closed for renovation” as residents work to recover from a March 2 tornado that devastated the Morgan County seat.

A makeshift flag pole decorates remains of the new Morgan County Judicial Center, which was under construction in downtown West Liberty when a March 2 tornado swept through.

Several downtown buildings in West Liberty are being demolished two months after a March 2 tornado devasted the town. Here, a bulldozer works behind some Main Street buildings.

A former attorney’s office across from the old Morgan County Courthouse suffered extensive damage in the March 2 tornado. The rear of the building has been demolished since then.

The century-old Morgan County Courthouse suffered extensive damage in the March 2 tornado, but County Clerk Donna Pelphry said officials hope to renovate the structure for another use.  The building is shown here May 16.

Morgan County’s historic plaque, knocked off its post by the March 2 tornado that devastated West Liberty, sits propped up on the remains of a World War I monument. The county’s old courthouse is to the left. The new judicial center, which was under construction when the tornado hit, is to the right. Both buildings were heavily damaged.

Workmen begin extensive repairs to the second story of a commercial building on Main Street in West Liberty on May 16.

James Cecil may be platoon’s last member. Photo by Tom Eblen

Eight months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, hundreds of people gathered around the steps of the Fayette County Courthouse to honor James T. Cecil and 69 other local boys.

The recent graduates of Henry Clay, Lafayette and other Central Kentucky high schools were forming the Lexington Platoon of the United States Marine Corps. Mayor T. Ward Havely and other dignitaries spoke at the mass-induction ceremony. A young lady sang the Marine Hymn, and women and children wept, the Lexington Herald and Leader reported in late August 1942.

Platoon members left in buses that day for processing in Louisville and training in San Diego. From there, they joined some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific Theater: Okinawa, Saipan, Tinian and Guadalcanal.

The Lexington Platoon will be honored again Thursday at the Urban County Council meeting. This time, Cecil, 88, will be the only platoon member present. “As best we can tell, I’m the only one left,” he said.

Mayor Jim Gray will present a proclamation declaring James Cecil Day. Councilman Jay McChord will speak about how he met Cecil and other World War II veterans while writing and illustrating his 2010 book, A Veteran’s Legacy: Field Kit Journal.

“We’re losing so many of these guys every day, it’s good any time we can honor them,” McChord said. “We need to remind ourselves of who they are and what they did.”

Cecil and Mitch Alcorn, his Lafayette High School buddy and the longtime Midway postmaster, began tracking down their fellow Lexington Platoon members several years ago, searching the Internet and running ads in veterans magazines.

By this time last year, the group had dwindled to the two of them and Elwood Watkins, who earned a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts in battle. Watkins died July 12. Alcorn, who earned a Purple Heart and later fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars as an Army officer, died Feb. 18.

Cecil grew up on a tobacco farm off Nicholasville Road. “We didn’t have any money, but we had plenty to eat,” he said. “We had milk cows, chickens and a big garden.”

When the war came, he decided to join the Marines rather than wait to be drafted. After training, platoon members were scattered to various units of the 2nd Marine Division, although Cecil served alongside Alcorn and a few others from Lexington. “We were just like a big family,” he said.

As I talked with Cecil last week, he pulled out a small envelope. Inside was a portrait of a Japanese officer he killed, and money and a ration card he found in the officer’s pocket. That wasn’t all: The officer was carrying a map of artillery positions, a find that got Cecil promoted from private to corporal.

Cecil earned a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in the battle of Saipan on June 20, 1944. He survived several Japanese suicide attacks on his camps at night.

“The next morning you couldn’t walk without walking on a dead Marine or a dead Japanese,” he said.

At the battle of Okinawa, a Japanese suicide pilot hit the USS Hinsdale before Cecil’s unit could land on the beach. Cecil spent 45 minutes in the cold water, watching for sharks, before a Navy destroyer rescued him.

“We had so many killed and wounded,” Cecil said. “Every battle, you just didn’t know who was going to be next.”

Cecil’s only trip stateside came in August 1945, when he was recommended for officer candidate school. Before he could begin, though, U.S. forces dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and World War II ended.

After the war, Cecil had a successful career as the owner of an Ohio-based trucking company. He moved back to Lexington after Janet, his wife of 52 years, died in 1998. In his apartment, he proudly displays photos of her, their sons and their grandsons.

Cecil’s health is good, his mind sharp. He finds himself thinking a lot these days about his wartime experiences, including the occasional nightmare with Japanese soldiers “getting after me.”

“I just felt honored and proud that I served my country,” Cecil said. “Coming off a tobacco patch and going into battle, that was a hell of a change. We were just a bunch of brave boys.”

The Lexington Platoon at basic training in San Diego, 1942.

Sandra Pianalto said she was outside her comfort zone. The president and chief executive of the Fourth District Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland usually speaks to groups about the economy or banking. And most of the people in those groups are men.

But Wednesday, Pianalto spoke to Women Leading Kentucky’s 13th annual Women’s Business and Leadership Conference in Lexington. She was there to talk about what her life and career have taught her about leadership and success.

Pianalto, 57, immigrated from Italy when she was 5 years old. Her parents came to this country with little besides a desire to achieve the American dream for their four children, she said.

As a child, Pianalto became interested in public service while helping her parents, whose English was not as good as hers, study for their American citizenship tests. She later earned degrees in economics and worked her way up the Federal Reserve system, from research assistant to one of the 10 people who periodically sit around a big mahogany table in Washington and set the direction of interest rates.

Federal Reserve officials have a well-deserved reputation for obfuscation when discussing the economy. But on this subject, Pianalto outlined four clear principles:

1. Embrace uncertainty and take risks. While it is human nature to keep doing what we know we are good at, the most successful people are often those with the courage to get outside their comfort zone and try new things. Pianalto’s parents “had no idea what would await them in the United States. That taught me a great deal at an early age.”

Women can be more reluctant than men to seek promotions they don’t feel fully qualified for, she said. With 15 senior vice presidents ahead of her, Pianalto said, she hesitated when superiors encouraged her to apply for the bank’s chief operating officer’s job in 1993. But a mentor told her: “First get the job, then figure out how to do it.” She went for it — and got it.

2. Commit to lifelong learning. “Education transforms lives,” she said. “And the environment for women to lead and influence within their organizations has changed dramatically in a very short time.”

Thirty-six percent of American women ages 25 to 34 have college degrees, up from only 12 percent in 1970. During the same period, the rate for men rose from 20 percent to 29 percent. Women have overtaken men in college attainment in this and every other economically advanced country, except Japan and Turkey, she said. But formal education is only one aspect of learning.

“The further you progress in your career, the more important it is to seek wise counsel, to keep on learning,” she said.

The world is too complicated for senior executives to know everything, so they must be open to learning and ask good questions of everyone, both above and below them in status.

“We can all learn from the people we encounter every day,” she said. Even in the most boring of meetings, Pianalto said, she tries not to leave without identifying at least one thing she learned.

Pianalto suggested that everyone ask their boss for two things they could improve. “You’ve got to get that feedback in order to get better,” she said.

3. Create a culture of respect and inclusiveness. Diversity, collaboration and cooperation are now vital to organizational success, Pianalto said. Everyone deserves respect. Smart leaders create an environment where everyone can contribute and succeed.

Under her leadership, she said, employees have made the Cleveland bank the top performer in the Federal Reserve system, and it has been listed among the best places to work in Northeast Ohio for a dozen consecutive years.

4. Take control of your career. When the Cleveland bank’s CEO job came open after she had been COO for a decade, Pianalto said she worked aggressively to convince the board she was the best person for the job. “That’s not always in our nature as women,” she said.

But even if you reach the top professionally, you must continue to listen to others and be accountable. She likes the question posed by longtime University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt: “Would you follow you?”

“I ask that question a lot,” she said. “How accountable are you to yourself, your employees, your customers, your values and your dreams?”

Case Clay, left, and Robert Clay pose with the newest star sire at Three Chimneys Farm, Flower Alley, father of 2012 Kentucky Derby Winner I’ll Have Another. Photo by Tom Eblen

MIDWAY — Florists’ trucks have been entering and leaving the manicured grounds of Three Chimneys Farm a lot over the past two weeks.

First, they came with condolences. Dynaformer, the farm’s star sire at $150,000 a pop, was euthanized April 29 on what would have been the ninth birthday of his most famous son, the late Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner Barbaro.

Dynaformer had suffered an aortic valve rupture two weeks earlier. The 27-year-old stallion’s foals, which included 130 stakes winners, earned more than $105 million on the track.

Last week, the flowers came in celebration. Only six days after Dynaformer’s death, I’ll Have Another, a son of the farm’s young sire Flower Alley, won the Kentucky Derby, impressively chasing down Bodemeister just lengths from the wire.

“When he started coming down the stretch, we started yelling and we haven’t recovered,” said Three Chimneys’ founder, Robert N. Clay, whose voice was still hoarse Thursday morning.

“That week is, in a way, a microcosm of the sport,” Clay said. “There are heartaches and then these incredible highs. That’s what keeps us all going.”

The landmark week was also a microcosm of Three Chimneys’ 40-year history, added Clay’s son, Case, 38, who in 2008 became the farm’s president and chief operating officer.

Robert Clay bought 100 acres along Old Frankfort Pike from a doctor in 1972 and put 10 stalls in an old tobacco barn. Over the years, he and former president Dan Rosenberg built Three Chimneys into one of the legendary breeding operations.

Three Chimneys has consigned about $500 million in horses at public auction, and its sires’ progeny have earned nearly $1 billion. The farm now has more than 1,800 acres, 100 employees and 400 horses — nine stallions, 225 mares and their foals and yearlings.

“We’ve been blessed with a lot of good ones,” Robert Clay said of the farm’s stallions. “We got a break with Seattle Slew, who was here 17 years.”

But the key to long-term success, his son added, was having great young stallions waiting in the wings.

“Seattle Slew died and Dynaformer and Rahy picked it up,” Case Clay said. “Dynaformer dies and Flower Alley gets a Derby winner six days later. It’s indicative of the strategy of Three Chimneys, which is to fill the stallion roster with who we think are going to be the next stars. We didn’t expect it to happen within six days, but it’s very encouraging.”

In addition to finding places to put flowers, Case Clay spent much of last week selling mating seasons to Flower Alley.

“We’ve been selling about eight a day, and it’s only Thursday,” he said. The Clays decided not to raise Flower Alley’s $7,500 stud fee for the rest of this season, but will decide in November how much to increase it based on how well his offspring do before then.

Flower Alley may not even be the biggest young star in the barn. Big Brown, which won the 2008 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, sees his first crop of foals race this year. “We’re getting a lot of calls from trainers saying, ‘I like my Big Brown’,” Case Clay said.

Big Brown is now the farm’s priciest sire at $35,000. The Clays hope he and Flower Alley will help Three Chimneys continue to bounce back from 2009-2010, when their farm and the rest of the Thoroughbred business suffered a slump.

“We feel like the industry’s hit bottom and hopefully is on its way back up,” Robert Clay said. “We’re in an industry that’s driven by discretionary wealth, really. Nobody has to have a horse in a recession.”

Case Clay is proud of his management team, a mix of veterans and young talent, which has managed to increase auction sales each year despite the economy. Three Chimneys does about 20 percent of its business overseas, with an office in Tokyo and representatives in England and France.

“The production side of the industry may get smaller than it has been,” Robert Clay said. “But there’s still going to be a demand for the top-quality horses.”

Case Clay’s job now is to figure out how to meet that demand. “Does Flower Alley pick up Dynaformer’s shoes?” he wondered aloud. “Does Big Brown?”

Sitting in his office on a beautiful spring morning, leaning against a pillow embroidered with the motto “Nothing’s Easy,” Robert Clay said fate can be fickle in this business — and fortunes can change in an instant.

The day Big Brown won the Kentucky Derby, Clay had his binoculars trained on the runner-up, an incredible filly he bred. Just as she crossed the finish line, Eight Belles broke both front ankles and had to be euthanized minutes later.

“There are highs that are really, really high and there are lows that are really, really low,” he said. “You can go from agony to ecstasy in this sport in two minutes. But that’s what makes it exciting, fun and a life’s work.”

Three Chimneys Farm near Midway is celebrating its 40th year. Robert Clay started the farm in 1972. His son, Case, became president in 2008, succeeding Dan Rosenberg. Photo by Tom Eblen

Dynaformer was famously ill-tempered. Robert Clay, the owner of Three Chimneys Farm, said Dynaformer would become so irritated when one of his stablemates was shown to visitors that he would kick the steel bars on his stall door, bending several of them. Photo by Tom Eblen

Students in the Plant to Plate program at the Family Care Center’s alternative high school began this spring by planting vegetables in donated bourbon barrels in the center’s courtyard.  Photo by Ken Gish

Sharon Aguilar said her 15-year-old brother likes to eat fast food, but she wants something better for herself and her 1-year-old daughter, Isabel.

So she is learning to buy and cook fresh food. She is even trying to grow lettuce in a little plot outside her family’s apartment, although a rabbit seems to be getting most of it.

Aguilar, 18, read recently that she and her peers might not live as long as their parents because of poor nutrition. “I don’t want that for my daughter,” she said. “Maybe I can make things different for her generation.”

Aguilar’s interest in nutrition was sparked by Plant to Plate, a service project organized by members of this year’s class of Leadership Lexington. The 33-year-old leadership development program, sponsored by Commerce Lexington, helps local professionals become more familiar with different aspects of the community.

“We started out with the idea of trying to do something with gardening, nutrition and students,” said class member Kenneth Gish, an attorney with the firm Stites & Harbison.

In the process of exploring options, the class discovered Lexington’s Family Care Center, which provides education and social services to try to help families become self-sufficient. Its programs include an alternative high school for young mothers and pregnant teens.

Leadership Lexington class members spent the fall and winter organizing Plant to Plate and enlisting the help of people and companies to make it happen. They launched the effort in February with a series of presentations for the girls about nutrition, shopping for food and gardening. They were given by dietician Judy Lawson, Alexa Arnold of the Lexington Farmers Market and organic farmer Sandy Canon.

Several of the school’s two dozen students got to attend the Bluegrass Local Food Summit, organized each March by community garden activist Jim Embry. “He’s my role model now,” Aguilar said.

Leadership Lexington class members helped the girls plant container gardens in the Family Care Center’s courtyard using half bourbon barrels donated by Buffalo Trace Distillery, soil given by Southern States, plants and tools from Fayette Seed, compost from Gunston Farms and garden hoses from Chevy Chase Hardware.

“It has been great to see the willingness of people in the community to get involved in this,” Gish said. “It was a fun process.”

The day I visited, the girls were getting lessons in healthy cooking from Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant in Beaumont Centre, and Sylvia Lovely, the restaurant’s owner. They do a radio show about food, Sunny Side Up, each Saturday at 11 a.m. on WLAP-630 AM.

“One of the things we want to talk about is that local is better,” Ashby said as he told of good sources for locally grown food. He taught the students to properly cut vegetables and prepare a simple but delicious meal of almond-crusted chicken, carrots sautéed with thyme, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese.

Aguilar said she had never been a fan of broccoli, but she still might try the mac-and-cheese recipe at home. Her daughter already likes fresh vegetables better than she does, she admitted.

“It’s not as hard as I thought it was to eat healthy,” she said when asked what she has learned. “And it tastes better. I don’t like canned spinach, but I like fresh spinach.”

Plant to Plate has made a difference, said Joanna Rodes, director of the Family Care Center, which is run by the city’s Division of Family Services.

“I’m pleasantly surprised at how much they have enjoyed it,” she said of the students. “I hear them talking more about cooking at home and making healthy choices for their children.”

Rodes hopes to build on many aspects of the Plant to Plate experience, from cooking classes to growing vegetables. But it will take more volunteer efforts from individuals, companies or groups like Leadership Lexington.

“We’ve lost a lot of resources,” she said. “So we just can’t do it without people who want to do good things.”

For one thing, Rodes said, the students’ excitement about container gardening makes her think a much larger garden on the center’s grounds could be successful — if volunteers were willing to help.

“I feel that we could take any of these avenues and go 100 miles,” she said.

Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant, shows Sharon Agular how to use a chef’s knife to julienne carrots. Photo by Tom Eblen

Jovanna Martinez, left, and Sharon Agular learn to cook almond-crusted chicken during a cooking class led by Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant. Photo by Tom Eblen

John Michler, right, and his son Robin are the fourth and fifth generations to operate the family’s flower shop and greenhouse business in Lexington. Photos by Tom Eblen

Plants flourish when placed in the right location. The same seems to be true for the Michler family’s plantsmen.

In 1901, Carl Michler started a botanical business on an acre and a half between Maxwell and High streets near Woodland Avenue. His century-old greenhouses are still being used by the third and fourth generations of his descendants.

Michler’s, which calls itself Kentucky’s oldest continuously operated florist and greenhouse, is an Aylesford neighborhood institution. It also has become a regional destination for people seeking John Michler’s gardening expertise and his vast selection of plants, virtually all of which are raised on the premises.

“One of my cousins claims horticulture runs in the male genes of the family,” he said. It certainly seems that way.

Carl Michler immigrated from Württemberg, Germany, in 1869 and settled in Lexington in the late 1890s. With an inheritance from his brother, Wilhelm, a well-known German scientist, he started his business at 417 East Maxwell Street. It was called Michler Brothers for two of Carl’s sons, Louis and Charlie, who worked there. Later, Charlie opened Michler Nurseries on Richmond Road, which no longer exists.

Louis’ son Karl and his wife, Jean, took over the florist shop and greenhouses after he returned from military service in World War II. When they retired, John, 57, and his wife, artist Claudia Kane Michler, inherited it and the family home next door.

John studied horticulture at the University of Kentucky and spent a couple of years after college helping a friend start a strawberry farm in New England. “I fell in love with perennials in Massachusetts,” he said.

John expanded the business to include a garden center with an extensive stock of perennials, herbs, native Kentucky species and exotic plants.

“People come here and see plants they say they have never seen before,” he said. “And they know we offer plants that are well-suited to Kentucky because they are grown right here.”

Inventory has expanded over the years with John’s curiosity and continuous study of horticulture and gardening techniques. “This winter’s subject was Japanese gardens,” he said. “I read a bunch of books and tried to learn that esthetic.”

As his knowledge has grown, so has the demand for his consulting and garden- design services. That work now supplements Michler’s traditional florist shop, garden center and propagation greenhouses.

Over the years, the Michlers have had many longtime employees who lived nearby and reflected the diversity of Lexington. Five of the nine current employees walk or bike to work. “This has been a nice neighborhood for us,” he said.

John, a former neighborhood association president, was active in getting historic zoning designation for Aylesford, a mixture of 19th- and early 20th- century homes and newer big-box student apartment complexes. “I enjoy living in a student neighborhood because there is such an interesting mix of people,” he said.

The recent economic slump hurt business, as many customers had less money to spend on landscaping and flowers. Michler’s now faces competition for common plants from big-box suburban stores that truck them in from out-of-state nurseries.

“I think having a small family business has always been a challenge,” John said. “There are no deep-pocket investors. We have to make a living for ourselves and our employees from what we do.”

But the rewards outweigh the challenges. “A huge part of a family business is that you get to spend a lot of time with your family,” he said. “That’s a valuable thing.”

Two of the Michlers’ three children are now involved in the business. Jessamine, 22, is the wedding flower specialist. Robin, 26, moved home last August from North Carolina, where he studied and worked in urban planning. (Daniel, 24, is doing research abroad.)

“I’ve really enjoyed being back,” said Robin, whose wife, Penina Goldstein, also is from Lexington. “We came back because of family and this business — and because of Lexington.”

John hopes the business can continue adapting to the times while retaining the valuable aspects of its heritage.

Robin recently added an online sales application to the Web site (Michlers.com) and updated the company’s database systems. That is why you now see a laptop computer on the antique table that serves as a checkout counter in one of the greenhouses Carl Michler built more than a century ago.

LOUISVILLE — Oh, the humanity! Oh, the humidity!

After a stormy night, the sun shone brightly on Churchill Downs all day Saturday as a record 165,307 sweltering fans turned out for the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby. They got a good show for their trouble, as I’ll Have Another blew past front-runner Bodemeister to win the $2 million purse.

The two-minute race capped a day of partying and networking that began long before Mary J. Blige, all decked out in red, rocked The Star-Spangled Banner to several interruptions of applause.

The beer-for-breakfast crowd arrived early in the infield, hoping to stake out a prime spot to pitch a tent, spread a tarp and set up lawn chairs. Many of the groups of families and friends have been coming back to the same spot for years, if not decades.

“I’ve always wanted to come,” said Tony Sirkin, a furniture store owner from Chicago who at mid-morning was trying to lay claim to one of the few remaining patches of green until a group of friends could arrive. “It’s something you’ve got to experience.”

His goal for the day? “To meet my future wife,” Sirkin said.

Nahru Lampkin of Detroit had the same goal Saturday as at his 17 previous Derbys: make a good day’s living as an entertainer. A fixture in the infield, he plays bongo drums and makes up hilarious rhymes about passing fans in hopes of encouraging them to drop some cash in his bucket.

“We come every year to seek this guy out,” Joe DeJohns of Chicago said of Lampkin. “This guy is really, really good.”

High above the infield and grandstand, in the air-conditioned comfort of the luxury suites overlooking the track, well-heeled groups of family, friends and business associates mingled.

For many at the Derby, it was a long day of glad-handing and networking. Lexington Mayor Jim Gray and U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler stopped by the Jockey Club suite of 21c Museum Hotel, the Louisville-based company that recently announced plans to open its third location, a hotel in Lexington, in what has become a small chain of boutique hotels.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer had a hectic day, greeting people, presenting an undercard trophy and entertaining 24 economic development prospects whom he declined to identify.

“It’s a great way to show off our city; you couldn’t ask for anything better than this,” Fischer said. “They always come away favorably impressed.”

Gov. Steve Beshear worked the crowd, which included a visiting group of other Democratic governors from Maryland, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina. When the other governors gathered in a suite, the hall was filled with their dark-suited security guards staring at each other.

Scattered throughout the Downs were celebrities, including Cindy Lauper, Debra Messing and Miranda Lambert. Head and shoulders above them — in both stature and popularity — were members of the championship University of Kentucky basketball team. They wandered through rooms posing for photos with fans before making their way to the Winner’s Circle to help present the Derby trophy.

The Millionaire’s Row crowd included many familiar Kentucky faces: House Speaker Greg Stumbo, Alltech’s Pearse and Deirdre Lyons, Toyota’s Wil James, lawyer and politico Terry McBrayer, and developer Woodford Webb.

The Derby is a fashionista’s paradise. Women seem to compete to see who can wear the tightest dress, the highest heels and the most bodacious hat. Among men, the competition seemed to be for the loudest sport coat, although Jim Leuenberger of Shawano, Wis., took things a step further. He attracted a lot of attention in the paddock with a bright red suit and matching bowler hat.

“I saw a guy last year with a yellow suit,” said Leuenberger, who was attending his 18th Derby. “He told me about a Web site where you can get any color. I’ve always wanted a red one.”

Many Derby regulars get their kicks by wearing outrageous hats sure to attract attention and photographers.

The first time Jan and Scott Baty of Traverse City, Mich., came to the Derby six years ago, she put a plastic pink flamingo on her hat. Her hats have gotten bigger and fancier, but she has stuck with the theme.

“This is our first year with a double-flamingo hat,” said Scott Baty, whose own Panama straw hat was covered with roses. “We ran out of singe-flamingo options.”

But few attention-seekers had it as hard as Tracy Lindberg of Chicago, who was in the infield for his 29th Derby wearing a 50-pound stuffed horse he called Seabiscuit on his head.

“I usually can wear it two or three hours tops,” Lindberg said. “I’ve done an hour, though, and I already can’t feel my neck.”

Marlitt Dellabough of Eugene, Ore., right, and Denise Meroni of Morris County, New Jersey, center, cheer on their horses in an undercard race on Kentucky Derby Day at Churchill Downs.  Photo by Tom Eblen

The view of the Twin Spires of Churchill Downs from the Jockey Club Suites on Kentucky Derby day.  Photo by Tom Eblen

Women make fashion statements at the Kentucky Derby with outrageous hats. With some men, it’s outrageous sport coats.  Photo by Tom Eblen

Jan and Scott Baty of Traverse City, Mich., were attending their sixth Kentucky Derby. She came the first year with a plastic flamingo on her hat and has stuck with the theme. “This is our first year with a double-flamingo hat,” Scott Baty said. “We ran out of singe-flamingo options.”   Photo by Tom Eblen

Jim Leuenberger of Shawano, Wisc., attending his 18th Kentucky Derby, attracted a lot of attention in his bright red suit and matching bowler hat.  ”I saw a guy last year with a yellow suit,” Leuenberger said. “He told me about a Web site where you can get any color. I’ve always wanted a red one.” Photo by Tom Eblen

Tony Sirkin, making his first trip to the Kentucky Derby, tried Saturday morning to save one of the last vacant plots of the infield for a group of friends. The furniture store owner from Chicago said his goal for the day was “to find my future wife.”  Photo by Tom Eblen

Joe DeJohns of Chicago, right,  said he has been coming to the Kentucky Derby since the mid-1980s and always seeks out Nahru Lampkin of Detroit, who sits in the infield playing bongo drums and making up hilarious rhymes about passersby in hopes that they will drop some cash in his bucket. Lampkin said this was his 18th Derby. Photo by Tom Eblen

Tracy Lindbert of Chicago was in the infield for his 29th Kentucky Derby, his second wearing the 50-pound hat he called Seabiscuit.  ”I usually can wear it two or three hours tops,” he said. “I’ve done an hour, though, and I already can’t feel my neck.” Photo by Tom Eblen

The ATM is always a popular destination in the Kentucky Derby infield, where there are plenty of opportunities to spend money.  Photo by Tom Eblen

May is National Bike Month, a good time to briefly note upcoming events and review recent progress toward making Central Kentucky a better place to ride bicycles for fun and transportation.

■ Bike Lexington, the city’s monthlong celebration, is sponsoring commuter classes and a commuter challenge. The family fun ride through town, which always attracts a couple thousand riders, is June 2. More information: BikeLexington.com.

■ Second Sunday’s third annual Blue Grass Airport event is June 10. Several thousand people always come out for a chance to ride, skate and walk on the auxiliary runway while it is closed to aircraft. More information: 2ndSundayKy.com.

■ The Bluegrass Cycling Club’s 35th annual Horsey Hundred tour is May 26 and 27. Saturday ride options include routes of 26, 35, 53, 75 and 100 miles. Sunday options are 35, 50 and 75 miles. All rides begin at Georgetown College.

The rides are supported with rest stops and “sag wagons” to pick up riders who need help. About 2,000 cyclists will come from across the nation to ride through our beautiful countryside. For more information, go to BGcycling.org.

■ Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop reopened Friday in a much larger space at the new Bread Box development at West Sixth and Jefferson streets. The shop started in late 2010 behind Al’s Bar on North Limestone and Sixth Street.

The non-profit shop “recycles” donated bikes for sale to low-income people. “Our goal is to provide reliable basic transportation at a price anyone can afford,” said Shane Tedder, one of the shop’s volunteer organizers.

Broke Spoke also provides a place where anyone may borrow tools to work on a bicycle in return for an hourly fee or shop membership.

The shop now has a 2,500-square-foot space, thanks to the Bread Box’s developers and an $11,000 grant from the Paula Nye Memorial Foundation, which the Kentucky Bicycle and Bikeway Commission administers from the fee that motorists pay for “Share the Road” license plates. Other financial backers included the Bluegrass Cycling Club and Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt.

Broke Spoke is open 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday and 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. The Bread Box, a former commercial bakery, also is home to West Sixth Brewing and several artist studios.

Broke Spoke’s new space opens onto the proposed extension of the Legacy Trail, from the Northside YMCA on Loudon Avenue to East Third Street and Midland Avenue. For more information, go to Thebrokespoke.org.

The Bread Box is next to Coolavin Park, whose former tennis courts have become the site of Lexington’s burgeoning bike polo leagues. Last weekend, the park hosted Ladies Army IV, an all-female bike polo tournament that attracted 40 teams with more than 200 athletes from the United States and from five European and Asian countries. Who knew?

■ An important piece of bicycle infrastructure just opened with little fanfare at the double-diamond interchange at Harrodsburg and New Circle roads.

The original design called for a sidewalk. But Urban County Councilman Doug Martin said he was able to work with Bob Nunley and others at District 7 of the state Transportation Cabinet to put a paved bike path on both sides.

That short path might not seem like much to motorists, but it solves a huge problem for cyclists. Crossing New Circle Road can be a major problem on a bicycle, and more solutions like this are needed.

Martin hopes this connection and others along the Harrodsburg Road corridor will allow the Legacy Trail to connect eventually with the new bike path along U.S. 68, providing a safe way to ride all the way from the Kentucky Horse Park to Wilmore, he said.

Meanwhile, Lexington recently installed bicycle detection devices at several intersections where lights often wouldn’t change without a car present. Also, an updated bike-route map of the city will be published in May.

■ Bluegrass Bike Partners is a new regional effort started in Midway to identify and market businesses and organizations that welcome cyclists. More information: Midwayrenaissance.org.

■ Pedal the Planet Bike Shop has become the state’s second organization, after the University of Kentucky, to be certified as a “silver” bike-friendly business by the League of American Bicyclists. The designation recognizes companies and institutions that provide certain ways and incentives for employees to bike to work.

The Miller House is a masterpiece of modern architecture that people either love or hate. When it was vacant and empty, some prospective buyers didn’t know what to make of it.

The house off Chilesburg Road provided the perfect challenge for Tom Caywood’s new company, Showcase Realty Services, which brings a different economic model to the business of staging vacant luxury homes for sale.

Working for the bank that has been trying to sell the Miller House for 16 months, Caywood and Melody Farris Jackson, an artist and designer, furnished and decorated the house. Then Caywood found three people to live there and keep it in tip-top shape to show prospective buyers.

Perry Dunn, an executive with First Federal Bank, said the house’s transformation has been impressive. “Tom has really taken the bull by the horns to the point that we’re considering raising the price,” he said.

Susan Sloane of Prudential A.S. de Movellan Realty has the 5,771-square-foot house listed now for $999,000. That is down from an initial $1.5 million, Dunn said.

The Miller House, completed in 1992 for Robert and Penny Miller, was designed by José Oubrerie, a French architect and protégé of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, one of the pioneers of modern architecture. After Robert Miller’s death, the house and 20.6 surrounding acres were sold for redevelopment in 2006.

Left empty, the Miller House was vandalized. An architect who admired the house created a non-profit foundation to buy it and two acres, and repaired the vandals’ damage. He hoped to make the house the centerpiece for a development of other modernist homes, but the project failed amid the home-building slump.

First Federal took back the house in January 2011 and has been trying to sell it, Dunn said. That has been tough, in part because of uncertainly about the surrounding property, which once provided tree-covered vistas beyond the house’s glass walls.

Caywood recruited Jackson to help him furnish and decorate the house. She was already very familiar with it: As a part-time teacher in the University of Kentucky’s College of Design in 2008, she had her architecture students measure the Miller House to create precise drawings.

Built mostly of concrete, glass, steel and wood, the house felt emotionally cold without furniture and art, Jackson said. The brilliance of the house’s design is in how it uses space and volume. But, when empty, it was hard for many people to visualize how it could be a comfortable place to live.

Jackson furnished the house with art, including some of her own, and a borrowed Horsemania horse that now stands in the dining room. Jackson and Caywood have filled the house with mid-century modern furniture borrowed from their own homes and those of friends.

“What I tried to do was make it so a prospective buyer could come in and say, ‘Wow, I see how this house is put together,’” she said. “And having people inhabit the house allows us to fill cabinets and give it a homey feel.”

Caywood, a former online advertising executive with the Herald-Leader and other newspaper companies, said he got the idea for Showcase Realty Services when he moved back to his hometown after living in San Jose, Calif., and Dallas.

Lexington had a number of unique luxury homes that had been on the market for a while. Owners were stuck with high carrying costs, such as utilities and lawn upkeep. They also sometimes had higher insurance premiums because vacant properties are more subject to accidental damage or vandalism.

Lexington also had a number of people with good incomes who wanted high-quality, short-term housing and flexibility for various reasons — a relocation, divorce or temporary job assignment.

The company works like this: Caywood furnishes and decorates the home at no cost to the owner or Realtor, except for any mutually agreed renovations. (The company works only with homes listed with Realtors.) He then finds “resident managers” to live in the home for below-market rent. They also pay utilities and routine maintenance in return for keeping the home neat and clean.

The result, Caywood said, is a win for everyone: The owner gets lower carrying costs and a more presentable and secure house to sell; the Realtor might get a quicker sale; the renter gets a high-quality house at a discount price; and Caywood makes money from the rental payments.

Since starting the company in November, Caywood said, he has worked with one house that sold. Now, in addition to the Miller House, he said he has a luxury condo and a horse farm on the market.

I spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon in December talking with Wendell Berry at the kitchen table of his Henry County farmhouse. He told me he was hard at work on an essay. “I’m in need of a lecture,” he said.

America was in need of a lecture, too. On Monday, Berry gave it.

The National Endowment for the Humanities chose the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, activist and philosopher to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It is the federal government’s highest honor for scholarly contributions to the humanities.

Berry’s selection had not been announced when we met, so he was vague about what he was up to. But I had the sense he was up to something big. As I listened last week to the recording of our interview, Berry’s answers to my questions were filled with themes and phrases that found their way into his lecture essay.

Berry, 77, delivered a searing indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our survival. You can — and should — watch the video of Berry’s lecture and read the full text of his essay, titled “It All Turns on Affection.” Both are online (click here).

Among Berry’s touchstones in the essay are E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End, an early exploration of the effects of industrialization on society, and the story of his own tobacco-farming grandfather’s struggle against the monopolistic power of James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Co.

Ironically, Berry said, Duke is remembered now as a philanthropist, the benefactor of Duke University in North Carolina. “If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough small farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of ‘philanthropy,’” he said.

Quoting his former teacher, the late writer Wallace Stegner, Berry said Americans have always tended to fall into two camps: boomers and stickers. “The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property and therefore power,” Berry said. “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Boomer ideals dominate America’s economy and culture now, he said. Almost everything has been reduced to statistics. Like corporate ownership, as compared to individual ownership, big numbers distance us from the consequences of our actions.

“Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment,” Berry said. “At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.”

Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now “never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage ‘to strengthen the economy.’”

Corporate industrialism, he said, “has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature.”

Industrialism’s effects are often defended as the “price of progress” or “creative destruction,” Berry noted.

“But land abuse cannot brighten the human prospect,” he said. “There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.”

Who is to blame? “We are all implicated,” Berry said. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we are all boomers.”

How can it be changed? By having more respect for our fellow humans and the land, Berry said. By focusing on long-term sustainability — things like local food, soil conservation and renewable energy. And by rediscovering the importance of affection.

“Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time,” he said. “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. … And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind and conserving economy. … We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.”

Since Berry began making these arguments in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, critics have dismissed him as unrealistic, nostalgic, even anachronistic. But more people are listening. Indeed, this seems to be Wendell Berry’s time.

As “local food” and “buy local” movements have sprung up everywhere in recent years, Berry’s books have attracted an international following. His lectures are packed, often by young people.

Can America change before it is too late? It can, Berry told me, if sustainability becomes a bigger part of the public conversation. “The only way to do that,” he said, “is to make as much sense as you possibly can.”

Will Lovan knows he is fortunate.

When he wanted to learn to play the trumpet, his parents bought him one. After all, Joel and Tracy Lovan were brass players in high school and college, and Joel, now retired, was band director at Crawford Middle School.

Lovan, above, was talented enough to get into the School for the Creative and Performing Arts at Lafayette High School, which enabled him to join the award-winning Lafayette Band. The sophomore is now an all-state trumpeter and plays in the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra.

But he knows that other aspiring musicians are not so fortunate, including many kids who live near his home in North Lexington.

So when Lovan, 16, was looking for a service project to organize and lead as part of the requirements to earn his Eagle Scout rank, he had an idea: Why not urge people to donate unused musical instruments to the elementary schools that feed into Bryan Station High School?

“My goal is to get more kids involved at an earlier age,” Lovan said. “And to get the instruments that Bryan Station needs to have the kind of feeder system Lafayette and Dunbar have. Even if they’re beat-up instruments, we can have them fixed.”

Lovan and fellow members of Troop 282 will launch the instrument drive Saturday by distributing flyers in several Lexington neighborhoods. He also is appealing to parishioners at Mary Queen of the Holy Rosary Church, which sponsors his troop, and members of his own church, Crestwood Christian.

Instruments can be dropped off at any of three music stores: Don Wilson Music, 275 Southland Drive; Fred Moore Music, 443 South Ashland Avenue; and Hurst Music, 101 North Mount Tabor Road. Or contact Lovan at (859) 559-1077 or WLovan@gmail.com to have an instrument picked up.

Cash donations to pay for replacing pads, corks and missing parts on donated instruments can be made to the Will Lovan Instrument Drive at any Central Bank branch.

Even before he launched the instrument drive, Lovan was given two flutes and two clarinets. He soon hopes to have a basement full of instruments so Shaun Owens, Bryan Station’s band director, and Michael Payne, the assistant director, can have them reconditioned. Then they will join the inventory of loaner instruments for students at the 10 elementary schools and five middle schools that feed into Bryan Station.

Owens said he was thrilled when Lovan approached him with the idea.

“The fact that he was willing to make this happen here meant a lot to me,” Owens said. “He is a Lafayette student, and there are students in Lafayette’s feeder pattern that are just as needy and just as deserving.”

But Bryan Station’s service area has a larger population of students with economic circumstances that might prevent them from becoming involved with music.

“A lot of these kids may be afraid or hesitant to do it because they know that Mom or Dad don’t have the money to go get them an instrument,” Owens said. “We want to make sure every kid who wants to do this has the opportunity to experience it.”

Students who can’t buy an instrument can rent one from local music stores, but some kids can’t even afford that. For them, Bryan Station and its feeder schools don’t have enough loaner instruments to meet the demand.

Owens said he sometimes must use a lottery to lend popular instruments in elementary schools. If a student ends up with his second or third choice, the desire to learn might be diminished.

“I want to make sure those kids are immediately successful,” he said. “If they don’t get that immediate feedback, they’re more likely to give up.”

School music programs teach students music, but, more importantly, they teach life lessons: dedication, practice, teamwork and striving to be the best you can be.

Lexington has been home to many of Kentucky’s best high school bands and orchestras for decades, so Lovan knows there must be a lot of old instruments gathering dust in people’s homes.

“I hate to see an instrument sitting in a closet being unplayed,” Owens said. “It would be much better in the hands of a young person who could make wonderful music with it. You never know what kind of difference you could make in their lives.”

Thomas Merton, the author and Trappist monk, right, visited with John Jacob Niles, singer Jacqueline Roberts, right, and accompanist Janelle Dishman at Boot Hill Farm near Lexington in 1968 shortly before Merton's unexpected death. Niles set many of Merton's poems to music he wrote with Roberts voice in mind. Photo by Helm Roberts

He was a famous folk singer and ballad composer, hoping to make another mark in music before old age caught up with him. She was a singer and a restless young mother, yearning to use her musical talent and training for something more than directing a church children’s choir.

John Jacob Niles and Jacqueline Roberts met in 1967 and were close collaborators for the rest of his life. Their dozen years together defined the last chapter of his career and charted the course for hers.

“My career became the music of John Jacob Niles,” said Roberts, 78, who lives in Gratz Park and is an active vocal coach.

Niles was a major influence on the folk-music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Now his music is experiencing a revival of its own, with the 120th anniversary of his birth on April 28, 1892.

Jacqueline Roberts with her E dulcimer, a copy of one used by longtime music partner, balladeer John Jacob Niles. Photo by Tom Eblen

A record label in New Mexico just released recordings made in 1952 of Niles performing his songs in the high-pitched, theatrical voice that was his trademark. In Lexington, several well-known performers will appear in a tribute concert, A Celebration of John Jacob Niles, May 2 at the Kentucky Theatre.

Niles’ best-known songs — I Wonder As I Wander, Go ‘Way From My Window and Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair — have become folk standards. But classical singers focus on the art songs he wrote in the years before his death in 1980 at age 87.

Many of those art songs — including 22 based on the poetry of Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton — were the product of Niles’ collaboration with Roberts and piano accompanists Janelle Pope Dishman and Nancie Field.

“These are some of the strongest songs of his life,” said Ron Pen, a University of Kentucky music professor and Niles biographer. “And they were written specifically with Jackie Roberts’ voice in mind.”

Roberts, a native of Russell in Greenup County, earned music degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Miami University in Ohio. After she and her husband, architect Helm Roberts, moved to Lexington from California in 1966, she got a job directing the children’s choir at Second Presbyterian Church. Professionally, she was bored stiff.

Roberts had met Niles at Christ Church Episcopal after she performed his song The Little Familyat an Easter service. Soon afterward, Roberts decided to give a recital at Second Presbyterian. On an impulse, she called Niles to ask what he would suggest she sing.

Niles invited her and Dishman out to his Boot Hill Farm off Athens-Boonesboro Road and made some suggestions. Then he asked them to try out one of his Merton songs to see how it sounded. “Apparently, he liked what he heard,” Roberts said.

On the day of Roberts’ recital, Niles and his wife, Rena, walked in and sat in the front row.

Roberts and Dishman started driving out to Boot Hill each Tuesday and Thursday. They would arrive at 10 a.m., work with Niles for two hours on his latest composition, then have a glass of wine and a sumptuous lunch prepared by the Nileses’ cook, Mary Tippie Mullins.

“For me, it was a gift from heaven,” Roberts said. “I had a 3-year-old, and I was just glad to have someplace to go twice a week.”

The young women helped Niles explore new facets of songwriting. Those sessions led to performances at parties the Nileses gave at Boot Hill for their eclectic group of friends. Then, Niles asked “the girls,” as he called them, to accompany him and his wife on concert tours all over the country, which Roberts did for a decade. In 1970, Field succeeded Dishman as the accompanist.

Jacqueline Roberts, left, Nancie Field and John Jacob Niles perform in concert at Transylvania University in 1975. Photo by Helm Roberts

Niles was a controversial character. The way he borrowed and blended folk ballads into his own compositions irritated some academics. Many people were put off by his big personality, quirky voice and dramatic performance style, which included playing large dulcimers that he would embrace on stage like a lover.

“He came off as an arrogant person, and I was told that my career would never go anywhere if I worked with him,” Roberts said. “Well, that was all I needed. I respected him. I didn’t care what the community thought of him.”

Roberts said the John Jacob Niles she knew was nothing like his public persona. He was patient and kind; an excellent musician and a well-organized composer. The greatest reward of their collaboration, she said, was being able to help shape songs literally as they were being written.

“It was like seeing something being born,” she said. “I saw him in all his moods. I saw him cry when he was touched by the music. I saw him proud when a composition was finished.”

One of their most special times came in 1968, when Thomas Merton left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Nelson County and traveled to Boot Hill Farm to listen to them perform musical interpretations of his poetry. Although Merton’s 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was an international best-seller, Roberts had never heard of him.

The Catholic monk arrived wearing jeans, work shoes and a sweater. “I thought he would be in a long robe and a hat,” Roberts said.

Merton, she said, didn’t seem to know what to make of Niles. “I think he found him to be a funny old man,” she said. But he liked what Niles had done with his poetry. As Roberts sang, she saw tears in Merton’s eyes.

Merton made a second trip to Boot Hill that year. Roberts said she thinks there would have been many more visits had Merton not died in an accident soon afterward while attending an interfaith conference in Thailand.

Over the years, Roberts became close friends with “Johnnie” and Rena, a Russian émigré who supported her husband’s career as faithfully as Helm Roberts supported his wife’s. Despite a busy practice in architecture and city planning, and the pressures of helping raise two sons, Helm Roberts photographed and recorded many of her performances with Niles.

Helm Roberts, who died on his 80th birthday on Aug. 26, is best known for designing the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Frankfort — a giant sundial that points to the name of each fallen soldier on the anniversary of his death.

Pen, the biographer, said Jackie Roberts made a huge contribution to the last chapter of Niles’ career. Their collaboration “sparked his imagination,” he said. “It gave him the will to keep writing at a time when most people retire.”

Since Niles’ death, Roberts has been a successful musician and a valuable resource for singers and scholars. “She has an interpretive knowledge of these songs that is really special,” Pen said. “She is a very informed singer and a master teacher.”

Roberts is often sought out by singers who want to know more about Niles’ music and how to perform it.

“Occasionally, throughout history, a few composers have been able to collaborate with a performer in a special way, to have the luxury of trying out material and writing for a specific voice,” Pen said. “This was one of those relationships.”

A Celebration of John Jacob Niles

Who: Hope Koehler, The Reel World String Band, soloists from the American Spiritual Ensemble, Tedrin Blair Lindsay and James Douglas.

When: 7:30 p.m., May 2.

Where: Kentucky Theatre.

Details: Tickets $20, $5 with student ID.

Call: (859) 685-1030 or Multigramproductions.com

Want to hear John Jacob Niles?

L.H. Dupli-cation, a New Mexico record label owned by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of the band A Hawk and a Hacksaw, has just issuedThe Boone-Tolliver Recordings, 13 tracks of Niles performing his music at his Boot Hill Farm on Athens-Boonesboro Road. Niles first issued the records on his own Boot Hill label in 1952, and they have been out of print since. More information: Ahawkandahacksaw.net

Singer Jacqueline Roberts, left, accompanist Nancie Field (and before her, Janelle Dishman) made twice-weekly visits to John Jacob Niles' Boot Hill Farm near Lexington for two-hour work sessions. "The girls," as Niles called them, helped him as he composed. Photo by Helm Roberts.

 

 

Lexington leaders were almost giddy last week after 21c Museum Hotels announced plans to turn the old First National Bank building into one of its award-winning hotels and contemporary art museums.

They had every right to be giddy. It is a big deal, for many reasons, and comes at a pivotal time for downtown Lexington.

The Louisville-based company’s decision to make Lexington its third expansion city after Cincinnati and Bentonville, Ark., validates five decades of public and private struggle to keep downtown from dying. It was a problem shared by most cities during an era of suburban sprawl and often-misguided “urban renewal.”

This $38 million project confirms the wisdom of infrastructure investments by city government and civic-minded foundations and companies, as well as the judgment of developers, entrepreneurs and artists whose creativity and risk have made downtown hop again.

It validates the work of preservationists, who understood the value of Lexington’s built heritage. And it raises the bar for downtown architecture. The 15-story First National Bank building, Lexington’s first skyscraper, was designed by McKim, Mead and White, one of America’s best architectural firms a century ago. The renovation will be directed by Deborah Berke, one of today’s star architects.

More than anything, though, 21c Museum Hotels’ plan affirms those who see great economic development potential in making Lexington a city where the 21st century’s best and brightest people will want to live, work and play — an urban landscape that is as special as the countryside surrounding it.

Steve Wilson, the CEO of 21c Museum Hotels, described Lexington as “a city that is looking forward, and we are thrilled to be part of that.” Craig Greenberg, his business partner, said: “We’re very optimistic about downtown Lexington’s continued revitalization.”

Greenberg said one thing that attracted them to Lexington was the new, visionary plan for redeveloping 46 city-owned acres around Rupp Arena and Lexington Center. The plan calls for renovating Rupp, moving and expanding the convention center, adding mixed-use private development and uncovering Town Branch Creek to create a downtown water feature.

Greenberg said the plan’s success “will be absolutely critical to downtown.” So will more urban housing, he added. The downtown condo market is still recovering from over-building before the recession. But the restoration of historic in-town neighborhoods has continued unabated, and real estate people see increasing demand for moderately priced downtown rental units.

Construction of the mixed use CentrePointe project also is important, Greenberg said. The 21c partners discussed locating there, but things didn’t work out.

Developers Dudley and Woodford Webb now say Marriott will build a much larger hotel at CentrePointe, joining tenants Urban Active gym and Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse. With an architectural plan that since 2008 has gone from bad to excellent, the Webbs are trying to line up construction financing and more tenants.

Having a 21c Museum Hotel across the street should be a big plus for CentrePointe.

Still, while many business people agree there is a market for a boutique hotel like 21c, they doubt there will be enough demand for a big Marriott until the city’s convention facilities are expanded, which could be several years away.

CentrePointe’s ups and downs have attracted a lot of attention, but a bigger story over the past four years has been the tremendous amount of small-scale development downtown, despite the recession.

Much of that was fueled by infrastructure improvements. Fifth Third Bank’s donation of the market house to a renovated Cheapside Park created a magnet for both people and investment, including great new restaurants such as Dudley’s on Short and Table 310, whose owners renovated historic buildings. Several more old buildings are being restored as bars and restaurants, including the soon-to-open Shakespeare & Co. on Short Street.

Meanwhile, Jefferson Street has blossomed as another entertainment district. The new West Sixth Street Brewing Co. at the end of Jefferson is the first piece of what could become a development boom north of downtown near the new campus of Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

Triangle Park reopened last week after the Triangle Foundation completed a beautiful, $1 million renovation that could make it another downtown people magnet.

Where does Lexington go from here? That depends on how well local political and business leaders can execute their ambitious plans and keep the momentum going.

That means continued infrastructure investment: street and sidewalk improvements, bike lanes and paths and more parking facilities, especially on the east and west sides of downtown.

The city’s Design Excellence Task Force must translate “design excellence” into a practical framework of guidelines, policies and procedures that the Urban County Council can turn into law. Those laws must include a ban on speculative demolition of old buildings with high reuse potential, such as occurred on the CentrePointe meadow. And all of that needs to happen soon, before the economy improves and development pressure increases.

While some people in Lexington have always believed in downtown’s potential, it is significant that outsiders see it, too. Executives of 21c Museum Hotels see it. So did the urban design director of the Boston Redevelopment Corp., who made his first visit to Lexington earlier this month and said he was impressed.

“You have all of the ingredients for success waiting to be put together,” Prataap Patrose told me.

After speaking at the University of Kentucky and spending a couple of evenings walking around downtown, Patrose had these recommendations: Plant more trees along city streets. Convert some one-way streets to two-way traffic. Add more bicycle lanes. Widen more sidewalks to allow for more outdoor dining. Encourage more urban apartment development and more revitalization of residential neighborhoods near the city center and UK’s campus.

“When you try to attract businesses, they look at the downtown first,” he said. “Urban design is proving to be a critical factor in making choices. People want to go where there is a good quality of life. You seem to have that here. You need to make the most of it.”

I spent the morning at Estill Springs Elementary School in Irvine, speaking to third-grade students and delivering four big boxes of old National Geographic magazines.

In a recent column about moving, I wrote that I needed to part with five decades’ worth of those wonderful magazines because I didn’t have a good place to put them. I offered them to readers who had the best reasons for wanting them.

In the end, I gave some to artist Whitney Withington and divided the others between Estill Springs Elementary School and the alternative high school for pregnant teens and young mothers at the Family Care Center in Lexington.

I took four big boxes to the Family Care Center on Tuesday afternoon, where teacher Laura Zimmerman said she would put them to good use in the school’s library. Director Joanna Rodes gave me a tour of the facility and told me about the impressive work the Family Care Center has been doing for two decades to help some of Lexington’s most vulnerable residents.

Teacher Stacey Kindred of Estill Springs Elementary wanted the magazines so she could choose especially interesting articles to make into reading packets that third, fourth and fifth graders could read in class or take home to read with their parents. The reading packets take a lot of time to put together, but I would guess they have a big impact on the young students who use them.  Kindred thinks including National Geographic articles in the packets will help open the world to her students.

While I was at Estill Springs, I met Principal Lorretta Cruse and talked with some bright third graders from classes taught by Kindred, Julie Raider and Kim Fallen. The students asked me a lot of good questions.  I hope they enjoyed the visit as much as I did. And I hope those National Geographics inspire them the way they inspired me when I was their age.

Since the first time I was involved with Lexington Children’s Theatre more than four decades ago, my acting career has taken me all the way from playing a dwarf to playing a toad. Fortunately, LCT has had much more success.

The non-profit organization, now in its 73rd year, has grown into one of the state’s largest children’s enrichment programs. LCT says it reaches 130,000 children throughout Kentucky each year with its resident and touring performances, classes and workshops.

If you want some good laughs for a good cause, LCT will have its annual Celebrity Curtain Call fund-raiser at 7 p.m. Saturday at the organization’s headquarters, 418 West Short Street. After a reception and a silent auction, there will be a series of short theatrical scenes starring well-known local people. Some of them actually have talent.

Lyndy Franklin Smith has performed on Broadway in the musicals A Chorus Line and The Little Mermaid. State Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr has quite a good singing voice. Others onstage will include former Vice Mayor Isabel Yates; actor and Herald-Leader music writer Walter Tunis; and TV newscasters Marvin Bartlett, Kristi Runyon Middleton and DeAnn Stephens.

I will appear in the role of Toad in a scene from Wind in the Willows. It is sure to be as riveting as my portrayal of Dwarf No. 4 in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during LCT’s 25th anniversary season, 1966-67, when I was 8 years old.

My most memorable line in that play — “Dust? What’s that?” — was delivered after Snow White politely offered to tidy up the dwarfs’ cottage. My wife says it still reflects my attitude toward housekeeping.

I asked to try out for Snow White after my mother took me to see an LCT production of Treasure Island. It was the first time I had ever seen live theater, and it inspired me to somehow persuade my third-grade teacher to let me organize a classroom production of Treasure Island, costumes and all.

Appearing in Snow White was fun. Looking back, I realize that I was with an amazing group of talented kids.

Lydia Hodson, who starred as Snow White, went on to become America’s Junior Miss and a Kentucky television personality before her untimely death in 1991. Jay Bolotin, who played the prince, became a Nashville songwriter, artist, playwright and filmmaker.

The Dark Queen was played by Margaret Price, now a successful playwright, author, actress and lawyer. One of my fellow dwarfs, Skip Hollandsworth, is an award-winning writer for Texas Monthly magazine.

LCT was started in 1939 by young members of the American Association of University Women. Despite being an all- volunteer organization until 1971 — changing directors and performance venues almost every year — LCT sank deep roots in Lexington, thanks to tireless organizers and patrons including Marilyn Moosnick and Lucille Little.

In the 1970s, LCT transitioned from an organization that put on plays with child actors to an acting company that exposed children to professional theater. Plus, there were classes to teach kids dramatic skills without the pressure of performance.

It was a controversial change, but it has proven successful, said Larry Snipes, LCT’s producing director since 1979. In addition to after-school and Saturday classes, children may take summer workshops that culminate in a performance, or they may join one of LCT’s teen acting troupes.

“We weren’t trying to take it away from the kids but to give them more,” Snipes said. “There are probably 20 or 30 times as many kids onstage here now as then.”

LCT’s programming has exploded since it moved into permanent performance and classroom space on Short Street in 1998. The organization now has a $1.1 million annual budget, about 60 percent of which comes from performance revenue.

Snipes’ next goal is to create an endowment to support educational efforts without having to rely so much on ticket sales. Nurturing young creativity is what LCT has always been about.

“We’re not here to create the next Jennifer Lawrence,” he said, referring to the young Louisville-born star of the new movie The Hunger Games. “We want to give average kids an experience that will help them be more creative and more confident no matter what they end up doing in life.”

Celebrity Curtain Call

When: 7 p.m. April 14

Where: Lexington Children’s Theatre, 418 W. Short St.

Tickets: $60 in advance, $75 day of show. (859) 254-4546, Ext. 247, or LCTonstage.org

One of the great things about living in a university town is the ability to attend educational lectures and symposia, which are almost always free and open to the public.

I recently went to a symposium at the University of Kentucky marking the 40th anniversary of the School of Interior Design. One reason I went was I knew very little about interior design or the education of interior designers.

I was like most people, school director Ann Dickson said: “They think it’s about teaching people how to choose the color of drapes.”

Modern interior design is about creating the environments where we spend most of our time. It is not just about making interior spaces more attractive, but more comfortable, efficient, functional, healthy and safe.

In an increasingly complex world, designers of all kinds are more problem-solvers than anything else. Many of the problem-solving approaches discussed by this symposium’s speakers and panelists are useful no matter your business.

Robin Guenther, a New York-based principal with the big architectural firm Perkins + Will, is a specialist in designing health care spaces. Why should anyone but health care professionals care about that?

Well, at 18 percent of gross domestic product and growing, health care is one of the nation’s biggest industries, Guenther noted. So much health care construction is being done that it is uniquely positioned to drive the research and innovation that eventually will influence virtually all construction.

Guenther gave a fascinating presentation about how the hospital building boom is leading to innovations in energy-efficiency, environmental sustainability, comfort and safety.

Most hospitals built in the late 20th century were poorly designed, she said. Patients and staff had too little natural light and ventilation, which has proven health benefits. Guenther cited studies that show the average U.S. hospital uses as much energy as 3,500 homes — and 40 percent more energy than comparably sized hospitals in often-colder northern European climates.

In addition, she said, too little attention was paid to the array of chemicals used in carpet and other non-renewable building materials. The body absorbs many of those chemicals, which can contribute to everything from cancer to obesity.

“Shouldn’t we be building cancer centers that don’t contain known carcinogens?” Guenther said. “This is really a design question. How we design our materials, our supply chains.”

The marketplace drives innovation, she said, and designers will increasingly be asked to play key roles in making businesses more efficient and competitive.

“Hospitals talk about a nursing shortage,” Guenther said. “There’s not a shortage of nurses so much as a shortage of nurses who want to work in most hospital environments.” That is because today’s nurses have so many more professional opportunities.

A key ingredient to successful design and innovation is what speaker Prataap Patrose called “disruptive partnerships” — bringing together people from different realms of thought and experience to solve problems.

“Problem-solving is no longer linear; it is three-dimensional,” said Patrose, who directs the Urban Design Department of the Boston Redevelopment Corp.

Inclusive, structured problem-solving processes are sometimes criticized as inefficient because they take time. But Patrose said that what may seem inefficient in the short-term is often more efficient in the long-term. That is because better processes produce more effective solutions.

Patrose said 80 percent of his job is negotiation — something he never studied while in college to become an architect and urban designer.

Mayor Jim Gray, who was among a group of panelists asked to respond to Patrose’s remarks, emphatically agreed. He said his background as a construction executive has been invaluable as mayor.

“Construction is fundamentally about project management and problem-solving,” Gray said. “The skill sets that we have so much need for involve collaboration — designing systems to get things done.”

Gray cited Lexington’s recent Arena, Arts and Entertainment Task Force as an example of a project that combined creative vision with “disruptive partnership” collaboration and a well-designed process for translating ideas into a plan.

“It’s about being on the balcony strategically thinking,” he said, “and also being on the dance floor tactically thinking.”

Patrose and Gray both emphasized that effective problem-solving requires being able to measure needs and results.

“The measurable becomes understandable,” Patrose said. “The understandable becomes personal and the personal becomes solvable.”

When the University of Kentucky beat Louisville and Kansas to win the NCAA championship last week, the media spotlight focused on more than the basketball team’s talent and Kentucky fans’ pride.

The nation got a vivid look at how far Lexington and UK still have to go in overcoming decades of neglect in some neighborhoods surrounding campus.

What should have been celebrations turned into near riots in the Elizabeth Street neighborhood off South Limestone. There were dozens of injuries and arrests as fires were set and vehicles damaged amid a hail of flying beer bottles.

Things could have been much worse, had not Lexington police and firefighters handled the situation with such skill and professionalism. And after the first and worst night of trouble, new UK President Eli Capilouto issued a stern statement. He urged students to “not be stupid,” and he warned that illegal behavior would result in criminal prosecution and university sanctions.

Some of the troublemakers weren’t UK students or even Lexington residents. Still, the national reputations of both UK and Lexington were tarnished. Will parents of prospective students wonder if UK is a safe environment for their children? Will people interested in moving their families or companies to Lexington wonder about the city’s quality of life?

Last week’s mayhem was a wake-up call to both UK and Lexington officials. They must redouble their efforts to clean up neighborhoods around campus that have been allowed to become little more than student-rental slums.

The problems began in the 1970s, when UK dormitory construction and maintenance began falling behind enrollment growth. About the same time, longtime residents of some nearby neighborhoods built between the early 1800s and early 1900s began dying off or moving away.

Many homes were sold to the university for campus expansion. Others were sold to student-rental entrepreneurs, who either cut up old homes into rental rooms or knocked them down to build boxy apartment complexes.

Once-lovely neighborhoods where many faculty and staff used to live fell into disrepair, as fewer and fewer homes were occupied by their owners. UK’s hands-off attitude reached its zenith in 1998 when officials banned alcohol from campus, which pushed student parties into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Landlords used zoning loopholes to build large dorm-like additions to bungalows and pave over yards, overwhelming those areas with people, cars, garbage and storm-water runoff. Those neighborhoods were not designed for such density.

Diane Lawless, the Urban County Council member who represents those neighborhoods, said the problems have been made worse by spot rezoning and years of building inspection that was “way beyond lax.”

City officials and neighborhood leaders have spent more than a decade trying to catch up to the problem. Studies by the Town-Gown Commission and Student Housing Task Force helped lead to new laws limiting off-campus parties, tightening zoning regulations and halting construction of the “vinyl box” additions. Mayor Jim Newberry’s administration launched a crackdown on code violations.

Still, about 75 percent of UK’s 28,000 students now live off-campus. That compares with only 25 percent of the 1,100 students at Transylvania University, where surrounding neighborhoods have experienced few student-rental problems.

Since Capilouto took office last June, he has made housing and neighborhood issues a priority. UK has launched an ambitious partnership with a private company to replace 6,000 aging dormitory beds and build 3,000 more.

“UK has been working much closer with us on neighborhood issues,” said Derek Paulsen, the city’s new planning commissioner. “But we’re going to be playing catch-up with this legacy for awhile.”

Paulsen’s appointment is another positive sign. For the first time, all city planning, zoning and building regulation will be under one department. Paulsen, an academic, has written several books about designing socially sustainable communities that deter crime.

New apartment complexes west of campus, built on sites once occupied by tobacco warehouses, have taken some of the pressure off older neighborhoods. But those developments bear watching, too. Any area dominated by transient rental property will be less stable than one that includes a good mix of owner-occupied housing.

The upcoming move of the Bluegrass Community and Technical College to the former Eastern State Hospital site could take pressure off the Elizabeth Street neighborhood. But without good planning, zoning, building inspection and code enforcement, Lexington risks the same pattern being repeated in older Northside neighborhoods.

In addition to better planning and zoning and more aggressive enforcement, city officials must clean up the damaged neighborhoods around UK. That will include significant investment in long-ignored infrastructure and more support for owner-occupied homes.

“It’s an economic development issue, because this is what visitors see when they see Lexington,” Lawless said. “What’s good for these neighborhoods and downtown is good for Lexington and the university.”