Today’s track: "Old Old Fashioned" — Frightened Rabbit
In 1891 Louisville was behind the curve.
Coal smoke, noise, a river town that had gotten big and dirty fast — and other cities had already built the fix. New York had Central Park. Buffalo had a whole system of them. Louisville had one small square in Portland and not much else. So the brand-new Board of Park Commissioners did the thing you do when you're behind: they hired the best guy alive. Frederick Law Olmsted. The Central Park guy.
He was 69. Louisville was the last park system he ever designed, and the Olmsted Network calls it the "ultimate" one of his career. He'd learned everything he was going to learn, and he spent it on us.
This part matters to anybody who owns property in this city.
His plan put the three big parks — Cherokee to the east, Iroquois to the south, Shawnee to the west — outside the city limits. On purpose. Out in the country, where nobody was.
Tom Owen, the closest thing Louisville has to a historian-in-residence, says it plainly in the Olmsted Parks Conservancy's six-minute tour: "He understood the economic potential of that lure." Put the park where nobody lives, and people will move there and build some of Louisville's finest homes facing it.
That's the whole issue. A landscape architect in 1891 designed a demand curve.
The city grew toward the parks because the parks were placed where the city wasn't. Then he strung them together with parkways — Eastern, Southern, Southwestern, Northwestern, Algonquin, later Cherokee Parkway — about fifteen miles of tree-lined boulevard inside a 26-mile system. The parkways were the delivery mechanism. The parks were the product. The houses were the point.
Olmsted retired in 1895. The firm didn't. His sons kept drawing Louisville for another thirty years: Central Park in Old Louisville, 1904. Tyler Park, with John Olmsted's stone bridge carrying Baxter Avenue over the ravine, 1904 for the bridge and 1910 for the park. Victory Park, 1919. Chickasaw, 1923. Seneca, the last one, 1928. Eighteen parks and six parkways when the drawing stopped.
Only four cities on earth have a complete, mature Olmsted system. Buffalo. Boston. Rochester. Louisville. Not Chicago. Not Atlanta. Not Nashville. Us.
The system took hits. I-64 went through in the late '60s along the rim of Cherokee and Shawnee — the twin tunnels under Cochran Hill exist because a group called Save Our Parks fought for them, and they opened in 1970. Then April 3, 1974, the tornado came down through Cherokee Park and took 80% of its tree canopy in an afternoon. Neighbors replanted — 2,500 trees and 4,600 shrubs, to the original Olmsted drawings. Those neighbors became the Olmsted Parks Conservancy in 1989. The whole system went on the National Register in 1982.
Now the real estate part.
There's a national body of research on this. John Crompton at Texas A&M calls it the proximate principle: across dozens of studies, an excellent park adds about 15% to the value of a home next to it, a problem park subtracts about 5%, and most of the effect lives within 500 feet. The Trust for Public Land uses a conservative 5% when it values a city's park system.
Louisville has its own numbers. In 2018 the Conservancy hired PlaceEconomics to run the math. Homes fronting an Olmsted park sell for 5.5% more per square foot than homes fronting a non-Olmsted park — same city, same kind of amenity, different designer. Collectively that's about $94.7 million in value and $891,000 a year in property taxes, just from the frontage premium. Properties within a half-mile of an Olmsted park are 8.5% of the city's residential parcels and 12.5% of its residential value. Seven billion dollars of tax base sits within a ten-minute walk of something Olmsted drew.
Design has a price. Somebody measured it.
So here's how you can actually use this when looking at a house.
Buy the design, not the ZIP code. 40204 doesn't carry the premium. Frontage does. Two houses in the Cherokee Triangle — same bedroom count, same square footage, same year built — one faces Cherokee Parkway, the other sits three blocks in. The gap between those two is the Olmsted number, and it's been holding for 130 years. When pulling comps in the Triangle pull them in two piles, on the parkway and off it, because they're two different products. [PULL: parkway-fronting vs. off-parkway $/sf, Cherokee Triangle, last 24 months — see notes.]
The three parkways are the same product at three price tiers. Eastern, Southern, Southwestern — same designer, same width, same trees, same idea. The prices are not the same idea. [PULL: median $/sf on parkway-fronting sales, Eastern vs. Southern vs. Southwestern, last 24 months.] If the east-side tier of the exact product is out of reach, the south and west tiers are the same drawing.
Then the second tier. Everybody knows Cherokee. Fewer people know Central Park in Old Louisville is Olmsted Brothers, 1904, and that the houses around it make up the largest Victorian district in the country. Tyler Park has the stone bridge and a neighborhood of 1900s–1920s houses built on the same principle — face the park. Chickasaw was the last big one, 1923, on Southwestern Parkway, and Chickasaw just became the city's eighth local preservation district in 2025. These aren't consolation prizes. They're the same firm.
And the multifamily line, because it's Thursday. The Olmsted neighborhoods — Cherokee Triangle, the Highlands, Old Louisville, Tyler Park — are where Louisville's 2–4 unit stock actually is. Big 1900s houses that got cut into three units in the 1940s and never got put back. [MF SCOREBOARD: active 2–4 unit listings in 40204 / 40205 / 40208 as of Thursday AM; median list price; median DOM.] A four-plex fronting a parkway is the rarest thing on the MLS.
One more thing, and it cuts both ways.
Cherokee Triangle, Old Louisville, Clifton, Butchertown, and now Chickasaw are local preservation districts. Any exterior change — windows, siding, a fence, an addition, a demolition — needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Landmarks Commission before you touch it. Interior work and paint don't. That rule is the moat: nobody builds a box next to your house and nobody vinyl-sides the block. It's also the constraint: your window replacement costs more, your addition takes longer, and the flipper who didn't read the guidelines gets a stop-work order. I've seen both. The moat is why the premium holds. The constraint is why you price it in before you write the offer.
The rest of Tom Owen's talk is worth eight minutes on its own, so a few things for the car:
The interurban light rail — private, roughly 1900 to 1910 — ran out Bardstown Road to Fern Creek, Taylorsville Road to Jeffersontown, Preston to Okolona. Those were transit lines before they were traffic. Today's corridors are yesterday's train schedule.
Okolona is "Lone Oak" backwards. The Post Office rejected Lone Oak — already taken — so they flipped it.
Smoketown is named for charcoal. Kilns.
The Old Fashioned was invented here too — at the Pendennis Club, sometime in the 1880s. Same decade Olmsted showed up. Louisville was busy.
I wrote Monday about the reef we were built on and Wednesday about the wall we hid behind. This one's different. This one wasn't geography. A man who never lived here sat down in 1891 and decided where your neighborhood would be, what it would face, and what it would be worth.
Then he drew it. We are all just as empowered…
📊 Yesterday's poll: Have you ever pulled the flood map on a property before you offered? Every time: 91.7%. Once, after a scare: 8.3%. Nobody picked “never” or “my lender does that.” You already check what’s already been drawn — today’s about who drew it.
Which Olmsted park is yours?
🏆 The Top Five is ready as always — five real deals on the Louisville MLS this morning, five ripe for a lowball, my number on every one. If there aren't five great ones, I don't send five. Reply "FIVE" if you want today's.
With Enthusiasm,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: What’s the favorite song you discovered from The Morning Bergeron daily track and playlist?
PSS: Time to learn more about loan assumptions and seller financing! Interest rates already in the 7.22% range.