April 25, 2024
Downtown Lexington, 1944
Downtown view of Lexington, looking west down East Main Street, circa 1944. Click on the image for a closer look. On the left is the landmark Phoenix Hotel, which was demolished in 1981 and 1982 by Wallace Wilkinson, who planned to use the site to build the World Coal Center skyscraper. It was never built, and the site eventually became the Park Plaza Apartments and Phoenix Park. Up the right side is the Ben Ali Theater, which opened in 1913 at 121 East Main Street, across the street from the Phoenix Hotel. At four stories tall. It had a main auditorium, a balcony and a gallery, and 12 private boxes on each side, for a total seating capacity of 1,507. The floors had peacock-blue carpets with gold trim, and the walls were finished in ornamental plaster, with mosaic title floors and marble wainscoting. Built to house the top traveling play companies and grand opera, it was a vaudeville house in that medium’s heyday and again in the revival of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In its later days it showed movies, closing Sept. 9, 1964. Its last films were the James Bond movie “From Russia with Love” and “The Pink Panther.” It was torn town in 1965. Today it is the site of the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza. Next to the theater is the Ben Snyder department store. The store was founded in 1913 and had locations in Louisville, Paducah, Elizabethtown, Bowling Green and southern Indiana. This location operated from 1935 until 1980, leaving Wolf Wile’s as the only downtown Lexington department store. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
Cadets visit Herald-Leader pressroom, 1950
This group of cadets from Millersburg Military Institute came to Lexington in February 1950 for an inspection of the Herald-Leader newspaper publishing plant. At that time the Herald-Leader was on Short Street directly behind the old Fayette County Courthouse. They spent some time in the pressroom, which was in the basement of the building, to observe the placing of cylinder plates on the press and noted the high speed with which the papers rolled from the folder. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
Central Exchange bank building, 1946
The Central Exchange Bank building, 163 West Short Street, seen in March 1946. Located on the northeast corner of Short and Upper Streets, Curry’s Drug Store was located on the ground level of the building. The seven story building is now the home of the Traditional Bank. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
Clerk’s office issues auto tags, 1940
Deputies in the Fayette County Clerk’s office had become so interested in getting as many 1940 auto tags as possible sold before the annual mad scramble that they gave a royal welcome to motorists willing to shop early. On February 19, 1940 L.E. Simpson, right, went to the clerk’s office to buy a tag for his farm truck and found Clerk J. Porter Land and 10 of this deputies eager to make the sale. The clerks had sold 11,100 tags for passenger cars but they had thousands more to get rid of before the March 1 deadline. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
McClure twins celebrate 8th birthday, 1951
Twins, Mark and Clark McClure, right, celebrated their eighth birthday with a Western-themed party in February 1951 at their home on Summit Drive. They are the sons of Mr. and Mrs. Chase McClure. In attendance were, front row, left to right, Ronnie Stokley, Priscilla Hegeman and Kenney Papania. Back row, Dorothy Hegeman, Joan Moore, Douglas McMeekin, Danny O’Connell, Clark and Mark McClure. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
Rick Pitino’s post-game radio interviews, 1990
Rick Pitino, right, University of Kentucky basketball coach, drew a record 11,000 fans to his postgame interview with Cawood Ledford after a Jan. 27, 1990 win over Mississippi. Previously, UK coaches conducted their post-game shows from the locker room, or some hallway in the bowels of Rupp Arena. Listeners on the UK radio network could enjoy the show, but fans in the arena missed it. Then, beginning with the Mississippi State game Dec. 4, the first-year coach decided to move his show out into the arena, where everybody could see it. For good measure, he had the audio piped into the arena sound system so that any fans who wanted to could hang around after the game and listen. And hang around they did. A few hundred fans stayed for the first show. But once the word got out, things just took off. About 8,000 fans stayed to hear Pitino after the Cats’ victory over Tennessee on Jan. 20, a record until after their 98-79 win over the Rebels. Even Pitino, who dreamed the whole thing up, is amazed by it all. “I had seen a couple of pro teams, Phoenix and maybe Indiana, do it,” he said. “So I said, look, maybe some of the players’ family members will stick around after the game, and they won’t be able to hear the post-game show. So, if we got maybe 100 people it would be worthwhile to pipe in the show and let them hear it. But I never expected anything like this. And today we had about 11,000, which really shocked me.” Ledford said Coach Adolph Rupp also did post-game shows in front of the fans. But they never caught on the way Pitino’s have. “The thing is, Rick really does a great job with the fans; he knows how to play to the crowd,” Ledford said. During this show Pitino broke away from a discussion of Kentucky’s full-court press to announce that he would henceforth call it the “mother-in-law press” because it caused “total pressure and harassment.” The crowd broke out in laughter. Click here to see more images from our archives or Rick Pitino and here to see images of Cawood Ledford. Photo by Frank Anderson | staff
University of Kentucky librarian Dr. Jaqueline Bull, 1950
Dr. Jaqueline Bull, University of Kentucky library staff member in charge of the archive department, inspected part of the collection of old books in the library’s Rare Book room in January 1950. In her hand she held copies of “Lantern-Jawed Bob” and Red Men of the Woods,” two of the hundreds of paper-backed dime novels which were popular in the last half of the 19th century. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
First African American Fayette County deputy clerk, 1955
Georgia R. Bates, new Fayette County deputy clerk, was shown at work, in a page one photo in the Lexington Leader in September 1955, in the chattel mortgage office at the Fayette County courthouse. Bates, the first African American to be employed in the County Clerk’s office, was administered the oath of office September 8, by County Judge Pro Tem Weldon Shouse. The 34-year-old Bates was married to James F. Bates, a garageman and chauffeur for Dixie McKinley, a local automobile dealer. Bates, a Republican, was a native of Lincoln County but had resided in Lexington since she was 12 years old. She was a graduate of Dunbar High School, attended West Virginia State College and studied business administration. During World War II she worked for the Air Service Command in Dayton, Ohio, as a clerk and the Sylvania Electric Company in Lexington, as a receptionist. For the previous 12 years she had been employed by Atlanta Life Insurance Company on Dewees Street. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
Winter storm dumps 10″ snow on Lexington, 1994
Mill Graves, 9, shoveled snow to clear his driveway on Richmond Road on January 17, 1994, as a major snow storm moved across the state. Snow depths ranged from 3 inches in southwestern Kentucky to 25 inches in Robertson County, the hardest hit spot in the state. Lexington had 10 inches. Louisville had 15.9 inches, breaking a record of 15.7 inches set 16 years prior to this snow, in the blizzard of 1978. Kentucky Governor Brereton Jones declared a state of emergency on the 17th and closed all the interstates and the Blue Grass Parkway. Photo by Mark Cornelison | Staff
Fellow motorists helped a pickup get up the ramp of New Circle Road to Nicholasville Road January 19, 1994, two days after a winter storm dumped 10 inches of snow on Lexington. Photo by Ron Garrison | Staff
The Milner Hotel on Short Street, 1947
This March 1947 photo showed the Milner Hotel at 114 West Short Street and ran with a story about the property changing hands. This location, at the corner of Short and Limestone, was a hotel site since 1893, when it opened as the Leland Hotel. It remained the Leland Hotel until August 1937 when a change of ownership renamed it the Milner Hotel. In March 1947 it was purchased and became the Charlotte Hotel. October 1948 again brought new owners who changed the name to the Henry Clay Hotel, which it remained until it was razed in December 1961 for a parking lot, which it still is today. Foundation footings of the five-story building were large limestone rocks which came from the old Fayette County jail which was located at the corner of Short and North Limestone streets. ItÕs stone fronting was Bedford limestone. Herald-Leader Archive Photo
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