The Brown Hotel, a Louisville landmark, is exemplary of the grand hotels of early 20th-century America.
Its Beaux Arts-style and urbane hostelry inspired a city in its heyday. Situated on the corner of 4th & Broadway in Louisville,
the Brown fell into decline in the 1960s, victim of its part in the city's segregation and rudderless in the wake of open housing,
urban renewal, and suburban flight.
At the literal and spiritual "crossroads" of a city in flux, the old Brown closed. For a decade it served as headquarters for the Louisville
Board of Education and as offices for the merged Louisville-Jefferson County School Board.
Under the progressive Louisville Board,
Martha Ellison founded The Brown School in the Brown Hotel Annex as
an "open" school. A school using its location and philosophy to unite Louisville youth across barriers in grades 2-12.
The small public prep school shattered academic barriers. A scenario that earned it many conservative enemies.
After the creation of the Louisville-Jefferson School Board in 1975, Ellison and the Brown's staff fought off a more-conservative
county-wide board opposed to its "open" philosophy. In the mid-seventies, The Brown School was attacked in a nationally syndicated column
by James Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick evoked an image of barefoot students wearing beads, sitting on the floor and calling teachers by their first name.
Long hallways that connected the school to the Hotel lured many Brown students. Earning passage through the hallway into the all-but deserted
Hotel, meant an afternoon of musky escape into a fantasy land of impossible promise. Beyond lay 4th Street, now turned into a pedway mall, with its greasy spoons, dying and demolished theaters, and latent
office workers, straggling and half-dazed at lunchtime. But inside, formerly glorious carpets, strange anterooms and reception suites, the
cellar a minor catacomb, and the roof
vaulted onto the heaven that is imagination.
In 1979-80, The Brown School, relocated to the nearby Ahrens High School building at 1st & Liberty. These poems are dedicated to the memory
of Martha Ellison, a great teacher, advocate and principal, whose vision enriched the lives of her students and colleagues in every way.
In 1983, a plan to revive the old Brown Hotel was launched. During the period of renovation, James, a Brown alum and University of Louisville
student, returned to The Brown as a night watchman.
The Brown's Roof Garden has long been a romantic destination for hotel guests.
The Crystal Ballroom, the Brown's grand ballroom, has been the site of Louisville social gatherings, dances
and proms in Louisville for decades.
The Todd Building, or Belle View as it was renamed, occupied the northeast corner of 4th & Market
in Louisville for eighty-one years. The Todd was demolished in a deal between state officials and Galt House hotel-baron Al Schneider in
June 1983, despite qualifying for protection under the Historic Preservation Act of 1975. The Todd's owners fought the demolition for several years.
The site is currently a parking garage with a first-story restaurant.
The Todd was the first load-bearing steel frame skyscraper built in Kentucky (ca.1902), from a design by Todd & Loomis,
Architects. This firm was responsible for many of Louisville's best buildings, quite a few of which remain intact. The Todd featured a three-sided facade.
Its lack of a north-side window made the name Belle-View, given it during the Urban Renewal period, a peculiar choice. The Ohio River and the steamboat
Belle of Lousville were nearby but could never be seen from the Belle View.
Charles Lindbergh was honored by a parade down 4th Street in Louisville in 1927, ostensibly terminating at
The Brown. The spectator of the poem gazes north along 4th from the reception room occupied by the palmer, traveler, pilgrim. Who is perhaps
nothing but a shade.
The Berkeley Hotel, a less distinguished building, was also demolished in 1983. It has little more to do with
the famous Anglican Bishop than that city in California. It was located just north of Broadway on the western side of 4th
Street. During the 1970s, a gay bar was locatedon the first floor of the hotel. The building was called *seedy* in its later years, an inhospitable reference Gardner
takes full advantage of within the Berkeley poem.
Rose Island, as it was once commonly called, also known as 18-Mile Island, is located in the Ohio River 18 miles north of Louisville. Before the great flood of 1937, this was the site of a picnic grounds and carousel. The packet steamboat Sunshine regularly transported picnickers to the island for daytime excursions through summer 1933. An occasion captured in verse by Venture in "Rose Island at Ohio River, July 1933."
Mdm. Fravoissart is based on a cabaret performer at the Savoy Theater, a burlesque house located near the corner of 2nd & Market St in Louisville.
Peter Venture and Leo Raskellar are based on real characters. Venture is typical of the businessmen who built the eastern portions of the city in the early 20th century, with the exception that he is a dress-maker heavily under the influence of women.
Raskellar is, of course, a descendant of German immigrants to the Ohio Valley,
perhaps the scion of an Evansville, IN cabinet-making family. His wildness and eroticism, hidden only by a sullen,
melodramatic nature, make him a loyal, powerful friend to have. He is firmly in touch with the green side of the soul
and able to call on great resources. These qualities also make him a terrible enemy. He sits by the riverbank at
dusk waiting for the evening primrose, Oenothera (heavy graphics).
He tramples those who tread on the delicate flowers of the riverbank. His is the voice that crows for sedum, stonecrop and bloodroot.
The Bogs of Gastineau, named for a French trapper in the city's earliest days when French roots and influence in the Ohio River Valley
were strong, , were drained in the 19th century. They lay below the city's berth at the current 7th Street.
The attitude of earlier cultures towards such wetlands should strike today's students as peculiar. Wetlands, or more derisively bogs and swamps,
were meaphorically associated with effeminacy, social confusion, matriarchal values, and other equally useful human traits during times of
patriarchal dominance. That such wetlands are crucial to the survival of humanity seems an irony of history not to be resisted.
For an example of the exploitation of swamps, and the praise of same in English-language poetry, refer to Ezra Pound's praise of Mussolini for
draining the swamps of northwestern Italy. It seems clear that Pound's praise did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be written off as a symptom of
his aleged insanity.
It is, of course, up to the reader to determine where the irony lies in Leo Raskellar's utilization of this metaphor in the Rose Island poem.
