Downtown Louisville is an interesting place, one of my favorites for wandering. Lived down there for a few years during the height of the Great Recession and it left me with an enduring love/hate relationship with it. Remember it being rather bleak, but that could have been the general zeitgeist of the time leaking in.
When you think of 'downtown' in a city, you think of skyscrapers, no? Louisville has a few of those if you're feeling generous with the term, but they comprise just a few blocks and outside of those things are of a more pedestrian height. What it lacks in skyscrapers, it makes up for in parking lots and garages.
Which makes sense, because downtown really isn't for the locals. In 2008, it was mostly catering to tourists and commuters working in the office buildings, and if you went wandering at the right time, you could walk down the middle of Main Street and pretend you had the city to yourself. Later, an arena was build and added sportsball fans to the mix, but then covid came calling and put a hurting on everyone. After that the office workers never really came back and it sometimes gets that familiar empty feeling again.
These photos are a few from downtown that just seemed to encapsulate that vibe it gets when all the visitors go home and there's more empty parking lots than people out and about.
Living downtown, one of my favorite games to play on walks was 'Spot The Surveillance Camera.' Wasn't hard to play, long before Ring and Flock cameras, downtown was already a miniature surveillance state with a camera here, a camera there, and a camera everywhere. After a while they start to blend in with that generalized air of inhospitality that seems to cling to the concrete and steel.
Probably enough putting down downtown for one day, what's the vibe in your downtown?