Old Louisville, Louisville

Old Louisville is a historic district and neighborhood in central Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It is the third largest such district in the United States, and the largest preservation district featuring almost entirely Victorian architecture. It is also unique in that a majority of its structures are made of brick, and the neighborhood contains the highest concentration of residential homes with stained glass windows in the U.S. Many of the buildings are in the Victorian-era styles of Romanesque, Queen Anne, Italianate, among others; and a large number of blocks have had few or no buildings razed. There are also several 20th-century buildings from 15 to 20 stories.

Old Louisville features the largest collection of pedestrian-only streets of any U.S. neighborhood. Eleven such "courts", where houses face each other across a grass median with sidewalks, were built in the neighborhood from 1891 to the 1920s. Most of the courts are centered off of 4th Street. Belgravia Court and Fountain Court were the first ones to be built in 1891 and are the most well known. Later ones included Reeser and Kensington (1910), which were built with large Victorian styled apartments instead of single family homes; and Eutropia and Rose Courts, which were the last ones built in the 1920s and featured small, single story houses. Belgravia and St. James Court were completely rehabilitated as a part of the urban renewal that began in the 1960s. These developments are apparently unique to Louisville.

Two of the three major four-year universities in Louisville are located adjacent to Old Louisville, with Spalding University to the north and the University of Louisville to the south. DuPont Manual High School, a public magnet school, and Presentation Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, are two other well-known schools located in Old Louisville.

The neighborhood contains The Filson Historical Society, Louisville's Central Park, which features the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival every summer, the Actors Theatre of Louisville Production Studio, and the Conrad-Caldwell House. Old Louisville hosts the renowned St. James Court Art Show on the first weekend in October. The area of 6th and Hill Streets in the neighborhood was the setting of the best selling novel Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Louisvillian Alice Hegan Rice. Today there is a non-profit counseling and services center, named Cabbage Patch Settlement House for the novel, on 6th Street at Magnolia Avenue, which serves children of low-income families. During the Christmas holiday season a number of private homes are toured in the Old Louisville Holiday Home Tour. With the publication of books about the spirited past of Old Louisville, the area has recently gained a reputation for being "the most haunted neighborhood in the country."