Advertisement
Published: February 8th 2012
St. James Court house
Another elaborate house on St. James CourtFor my final day in Louisville, I ignored the festival completely and dove into history.
Today is the traditional day of another unusual competition, the
steamboat race, but it was cancelled due to the river being flooded and dangerous.
I found ways to make up for it.
Muhammad Ali Center
My first site for the day was the
Muhammad Ali Center.
Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer in history, was born Cassius Clay in Louisville.
The Center broadly consists of two parts.
The first is a history museum dedicated to his
life and career.
The other part is an examination of Ali’s core values, and how visitors can apply those values in their own lives.
It should go without saying that the Center handles the first part well, and lays it on a little thick in the second part.
In Ali’s defense, he is not the first professional athlete to have dreams of this sort of grandeur, and he has more claims to it than most thanks to his civil rights and humanitarian work outside the ring.
The two parts are weaved together through the exhibits.
Broadly, an area
Ali center fountain
Fountain in front of the Ali center will first talk about Ali’s experiences at a given time, and then explore what he learned from it.
He first learned to box at age 10 by going to the police recreation league.
He wanted to learn to beat up the kids who stole his bike.
He had real talent, and one of the supervisors there directed him to a real gym.
The lessons from this period have to deal with commitment and character.
Becoming a good athlete requires doing the same sort of training over and over.
Once Ali had an outlet for his energy in boxing, the behavior of kids in his neighborhood meant less to him.
As a former high school athlete myself, I appreciated some of the points and felt that others were overdone.
Some of the things people learn in athletics do carry over to other things (focus on a goal, make it feel achievable, use it for motivation, break the process into multiple little pieces) while others do not (the effort needed to squeeze out one more training set is very different to the effort needed to finish a project in the middle of the night).
Conrad Caldwell house
Also called "Conrad's Palace", this is widely considered the most elaborate house in Old Louisville The next section deals with the Civil Rights era.
The displays push the point that Ali’s actions during this time can’t be analyzed separately from the conditions in which he made them.
Clay grew up in a segregated Louisville.
He was a fairly devout Baptist.
African Americans at the time were taught that if they keep their mouths shut, people would treat them relatively well.
Cassius, of course, won a gold medal at the
1960 Rome Olympics.
His homecoming was a big shock.
Most whites in Louisville were quite happy to praise his accomplishments and fame on one hand and then deny him lunch service on the other.
Ali found the contrast humiliating and frustrating.
In response, he began learning more about the early Civil Rights movement, and ultimately
joined the Nation of Islam (changing his name at the time).
The loud, often boasting, pronouncements for which he is famous started during this era.
Things reached a head during the Vietnam War.
As most people know, Ali refused to be drafted.
He applied for an exemption as a Nation of Islam minister, which was
St. James fountain
The fountain in the center of St. James Court. denied.
This received much coverage in the press, which mostly painted Ali as a coward.
The final result is that his passport was suspended, and all state boxing commissions suspended his license to fight.
The suspensions lasted until 1971.
The displays really try to advocate just how brutal conditions were at the time.
Most of the footage was familiar from the National Civil Rights Museum (see
By My Works Ye Shall Know Me) but would be downright shocking otherwise.
The Vietnam War and protest footage is equally brutal.
The point the center makes with all this is that Ali did the things he did because he was reacting to an environment that taught blacks to do nothing at all.
He boasted because he felt he had to in order to obtain the respect he wanted.
He refused the draft because he felt the war was unjust.
How can someone respect themselves when they can’t even eat lunch in their home town?
The values discussed in this area are courage, confidence, and spirituality.
Using fame to speak out against racism was a courageous act.
Refusing to
St. James apartments
Apartment house on St. James Court, very unusual for the time. fight a war despite the consequences was even more courageous.
Confidence was needed to win in the ring and confront an evil society outside it.
Living in a racist era eroded that confidence, and boasting built it back up.
Finally, a source of spiritual grounding, first in Baptism and then in Islam, provided a foundation for all of this.
The weakest part is the sections on applying these lessons to one’s own life.
Everyone experiences situations differently, especially spiritual ones, and the museum tries to respect this.
Unfortunately, the result was low-key mush that almost felt like a New Age self-improvement seminar.
The next section covers Ali’s professional career.
It is the strongest part of the entire center.
Every major fight, including the
Rumble in the Jungle and the
Thrilla in Manila, is presented on a computer display.
One can watch the footage with slow motion and replays, with all sorts of statistics and analysis.
I wish more sports museums covered games this way.
In addition, the display area has a model boxing ring in the center with even more footage.
The final section discusses
Old Louisville house
Another elaborate Victorian house in Old Louisville Ali’s career after he retired from boxing in 1980.
He spent a lot of time advocating for various causes, especially the Nation of Islam.
He may be the group’s most famous member at this point.
He also developed
Parkinson’s disease, and raised a large amount of money to find a cure.
The center lays on the arguments that Ali deserves to be remembered for far more than just boxing and refusing Vietnam service.
This section reminded me of how the Elvis museum at Graceland (see
Walking in Memphis) tries to paint its subject as a saint.
The museum has an entire wall of awards Ali won for humanitarian work.
There is a wall of Ali related artwork from local school children.
The atmosphere was thickest of all in the film of
Ali’s appearance at the 1996 Olympics, and how the whole world loved him at that moment.
For me, this section was the most disappointing part of the entire center due to the obvious amount of effort it uses to make its points.
I get it, Ali did a lot of good work outside the ring.
Present that information, and let it speak
Old Louisville garden court
Old Louisville is famous for alleys filled with gardens. Here is one of them. for itself.
Old Louisville Victorian District
I spent the rest of the day wandering around
Old Louisville.
Until the late 1870s, this area was a field.
Local promoters then held a huge fair here in 1883 called the
Great Southern Exposition.
Real estate developers starting building houses here soon afterward, and it became Louisville’s first suburb.
The people who moved here were wealthy, and they built palatial homes.
The neighborhood is now the largest collection of Victorian housing in the country, beating even Wilmington North Carolina. (see
Flowers and Queens)
I toured the area with the aid of a map put out by the
Old Louisville Center.
It lists most of the major buildings, who designed them, and something about their owners.
Many of the architects were locals.
They based the buildings on the
Italian and French trends that were so popular at the time.
One major contrast with the Victorian buildings of Wilmington is that these were mostly made of stone, not wood.
Any tour of Old Louisville needs to start with
St James Court.
This was the first street developed in the area, and the most expensive.
It’s
Mansion and carriageway
Another Old Louisville mansion, with carriageway visible on the right. a broad garden boulevard in the Parisian tradition, with a large fountain in the middle.
The buildings around it feature exquisite carved stonework, a sign of wealth.
Many have cut glass windows and doors, and several have formal gardens.
Unusually for the time, three were designed as apartment buildings.
The rest of the area follows the
same pattern.
One house, built by one William Wathen, was designed to look like a miniature version of a famous New York City hotel.
It features beautifully painted woodwork in a riot of colors.
One house was built over a spring said to have medicinal properties (the spring is now dry).
A few houses have carriage entrances, separate entrances on the side of the house with overhangs.
At one, the horse barn is still visible behind it.
The tour, oddly enough, also includes one of Louisville’s first gas stations, Diamond Oils, a concrete bunker with a tiled roof.
The original logo is still visible on the floor if one knows where to look for it.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.241s; Tpl: 0.021s; cc: 12; qc: 28; dbt: 0.1741s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
