Approximate outline of the Warehouse Block in Lexington. Source: Google maps<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe district is very informal. It\u2019s a mishmash of industrial, warehouse, and commercial buildings\u2014no great architecture. But that doesn\u2019t matter, because the buildings have character and variety. The performance and event space is a former railroad loading yard, with paved parking, a large diagonal concrete pad, some unpaved ground, and landscaping.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It helps that the infrastructure is walkable. It is built on a grid that connects to three nearby residential neighborhoods. The streets are relatively narrow, with some on-street parking. There are sidewalks, a few street trees, and the buildings come close to the street. Everything is nearby.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Warehouse Block is centered on Walton, National, and North Ashland avenues. The Walkers restored dozens of buildings to create a social center for Lexington, a city of about 330,000 people.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have some old historic properties, and some are a bit newer, but they have a nice blend between the properties and the tenants,\u201d Walker says. The Bell Court, Mentelle, and Kenwick neighborhoods, with housing from the early 20th<\/sup>\u00a0Century, connect to the district. The Walkers created this district by fixing up and reoccupying what was already there, with very little new construction. The owners have planted trees and have been enabled by a zoning overlay district adopted by the City.<\/p>\nIf Walker has a development philosophy, it has several components. One is that he supports local agriculture by bringing produce to the City. He lives on a farm three miles away. \u201cThe idea is to bring the farm to the neighborhood\u201d\u2014in the form of farm-to-table and farm-to-retail. So much of the land around Lexington is devoted to horses and estates\u2014general agriculture needs support, he says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because much of the real estate was bought cheaply with low debt, it helps to keep the rents low and attract local businesses. There are no chain stores. Performances are generally free and include many music genres, in addition to the more highbrow Kentucky Ballet, which is a tenant, and the local philharmonic, which performs in the same informal space.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis generation doesn\u2019t like stuffy,\u201d says Walker. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to dress up. They want an approachability that lets you walk by and see what\u2019s happening today. Let\u2019s just go to the neighborhood and see what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\nWarehouse Block buildings before rehabilitation. Source: Warehouse Block.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHe has learned to\u00a0gather neighborhood input, from the design of the outdoor space to which new businesses would make locals happy. They want\u00a0coffee and ice cream, which is no surprise, and they are now available. The biggest mistake was renting to a music venue, Cosmic Charlie\u2019s, about 10 years ago. It was too loud and not appropriate for the area. It took about a year to resolve as the business\u00a0found a new location.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This kind of incremental urban entertainment district, which turned an eyesore into an amenity, could be created in many places that have empty warehouses and commercial buildings. What\u2019s remarkable is how unremarkable this district is. It\u2019s certainly no SoHo with its fabulous cast-iron buildings. Although the result is significant for Lexington, it covers a relatively small area embedded in surrounding neighborhoods. There must be hundreds of similar places in cities and towns, large and small. Some of them have been revitalized\u2014others await incremental development. The Warehouse Block models one way to do that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cnu.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Randy Walker moved his electrical contracting business into a disinvested industrial building in Lexington, Kentucky, 40 years ago, and started buying nearby abandoned buildings and fixing them up.\u00a0 The revitalization steadily expanded into the 13-acre\u00a0Warehouse Block, an urban entertainment district spanning several mixed-use blocks. Chad Walker, Randy\u2019s son, now manages the Warehouse Block with more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2278479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/An-accidental-urban-entertainment-district.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2278480,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278478\/revisions\/2278480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2278479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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