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| Clockwise from upper left: 440, 444, 448, and 446 Jefferson Street. |
Demolition permits have been filed to tear down four shotgun houses, each built ca. 1890, along the increasingly popular Jefferson Street corridor on Lexington, Kentucky’s northside.
As noted last week in another demolition watch, the “single-story shotgun is one of a dying breed.” These four shotgun houses were constructed a short time after the Warfield Bell Subdivision was platted. Located between Fourth and Sixth streets on both sides of Jefferson (plus Fifth and Sixth on both sides of Smith Street Extended), the subdivision consisted of 113 lots. It was the city’s first subdivision of 100+ lots.
I can’t find a proposal of what will replace these dwellings. Though at least one has been abandoned for some time and another is the site of multiple nuisance violations in the past few years, these houses did provide affordable housing in Lexington for 125 years.
And a quick note from last week’s Demo Watch: I posted a Watch for 3 structures already demolished. Mea culpa. I received word of the filing of the demolition permits on March 17 and posted three days later. The permits were, however, filed earlier. There isn’t much I can do about that, but I will continue to try and post Demo Watch posts. If a structure has already been demolished, at least something will remain written of it.
The permits for the above four shotguns on Jefferson Street, according to the Citygram I received, were filed on March 20. As of this morning, they hadn’t been demolished though it appears that the fire department has been doing some practice on the roofs of a few of the structures.
