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Today’s track: Jesus, Etc. — Wilco

In 1891, a tanner from Alsace, France named Theophilus Conrad bought a 120-by-200-foot lot at the top of a brand-new street called St. James Court.

He'd learned the leather business, came to America, and helped start a tannery here that he eventually owned outright. A tannery is where cowhides go to become leather, and in the 1890s Louisville had plenty of cowhides. It made him rich. So he built a castle.

Bedford limestone. Towers and archways. Parquet floors. Woodwork in seven different kinds of hardwood. German immigrant craftsmen put the golden oak staircase together piece by piece on the front lawn before they carried it inside. It had indoor plumbing and electric lights, which in 1895 was basically a spaceship. People called it Conrad's Castle. Some people called it Conrad's Folly.

A few miles away in Butchertown, a German immigrant named Charles Stecker also owned a tannery. Between 1912 and 1915, he built 24 shotgun houses on and around Mellwood Avenue. Little narrow cottages, one room wide, rooms lined up front to back, built to rent to the people who worked in places like his.

Two tanners. Same trade, same city, same generation.

One built a castle. One built two dozen cottages for workers.

The castle is still standing. Several of Stecker's cottages are too. You could drive past both this weekend.

I actually once sold the childhood home of the Seelbach family. I currently have a Mellwood shotgun available for sale….with the best view in Louisville.

Here's what most people who live here have no idea about. Louisville has the largest collection of Victorian mansions in the United States. Louisville also has more shotgun houses than any other city in America.

Number one in both. The fanciest houses of that era and the plainest, in the same city, built in the same thirty-ish years.

That's not a coincidence. It's the same story, told from opposite ends.

Last Friday I wrote about a tale of two cities: how the cheapest homes in Jefferson County slowed down the most this fall while homes over $600,000 sold more than they did last year. Economists have a name for that shape. They call it a K-shaped economy. After a shock, the top arm of the K keeps climbing and the bottom arm slides down. Same economy, two directions at once. No middle ground.

Louisville has drawn a K before. You can still see it in the houses. Let me show you how it got built.

In 1870, Louisville had about 100,000 people. By 1900, it had doubled. People came from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland and Italy to work in the factories: tanneries, packing houses, distilleries, foundries, rail yards, tobacco warehouses.

Nobody had a car. You walked to work. So you needed a place to live close to the plant, cheap enough to afford on a factory wage.

Hundreds of local builders, people like Charles Stecker, answered that with the same house over and over. The shotgun.

If you've never been inside one, here's the layout. One room wide, usually 12 to 15 feet across. Three or four rooms deep, in a straight line. No hallway. You walk from the front room through the bedroom to get to the kitchen. The skinny shape let builders fit more houses on a block, and before anybody had air conditioning, a breeze could run straight through from the front door to the back.

The legend behind the name is that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the shot would fly out the back without touching a wall. The earliest use of the term in print that historians have found is a 1917 New Orleans newspaper joking that you could stand at the front door and shoot the dinner right off the kitchen stove.

And no, they weren't built skinny to dodge a tax on how wide the lot was. You'll hear that one a lot. New Orleans preservationists say it's a myth.

Historians trace the design back through New Orleans to Haiti, and many believe it goes back further, to West Africa. It traveled up the Mississippi and the Ohio. In Louisville, it first showed up on Shippingport Island, right by the canal I told you about in Right Twice, shortly after the Civil War.

Then it spread everywhere. Germantown. Schnitzelburg. Butchertown. Portland. Russell. California. Smoketown. Clifton. The Highlands.

There are a couple of variations worth knowing:

A double-barrel shotgun is two shotguns sharing a middle wall, side by side, with two front doors. That's a duplex.

A camelback is a shotgun with a second story on just the back half, so from the side it has a hump like a camel.

So how did Louisville end up number one? New Orleans used to hold the title. Then Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and wiped out thousands of homes, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was full of shotguns. Architectural historians now credit Louisville with the most shotgun houses of any American city, and even a New Orleans TV station said so on air this spring. To be fair, nobody has an exact count. But the crown moved up the river.

The land south of Broadway was annexed into the city in 1868. For years it grew slowly. Then Henry Watterson, who ran the Courier-Journal, pushed Louisville to host the Southern Exposition. It was a world's-fair-style show that ran every year from 1883 to 1887, on about 45 acres right where Old Louisville sits today. Around a million people came through over those five years, and Edison lit it up with 4,600 light bulbs. (I told you that story in The Pride of Louisville.)

When the exposition closed, developers carved up the grounds. The Victoria Land Company laid out St. James Court and Belgravia Court, modeled on the fancy squares of London: a long green down the middle, a fountain, and on Belgravia, a walking-only lane with no street at all. Every lot was filled by 1905.

All around those courts, along Third and Fourth Streets, bourbon barons, horse-racing families, tobacco money and industrialists like Conrad built Queen Anne towers, Romanesque stone fortresses, French chateaus and Beaux-Arts palaces. Roughly 1,400 Victorian-era homes across about 48 blocks.

It's the third-largest historic preservation district in the country, and the largest one that's almost entirely Victorian. The American Planning Association named it one of America's great neighborhoods in 2016.

Fun fact: nobody called it Old Louisville back then. It was the Southern Extension, and after that, basically a nameless suburb. The name "Old Louisville" didn't get adopted until 1961.

Old Louisville's heyday was short. Streetcars, and then cars, let the wealthy keep moving farther out: the Highlands, Cherokee Triangle, then out east. By World War I, the shine was fading. During the Depression, a lot of those mansions turned into boarding houses. During World War II, many were cut up into apartments to house all the workers coming in for the war effort. By 1928, there were already more than 170 apartment buildings in Old Louisville, most of them small two- and four-unit buildings.

Conrad's Castle went with it. After the Conrads, it was sold to William Caldwell, who made his money building water tanks. In 1947 it became a Presbyterian home for elderly women, and it stayed that way for about forty years. In 1987, the neighbors on St. James Court got together, bought it, and turned it into the museum it is today.

The neighborhood only survived because people fought for it. In 1957, residents started the St. James Court Art Show to pay for the upkeep of the court and its fountain. That's the same art show that filled Old Louisville the first weekend of this month. In 1961, a group gave the area a name, Old Louisville, specifically so they could rally people to save it. By 1975 it was on the National Register of Historic Places.

The shotguns had their own rough century. Plenty fell apart. Plenty got torn down. Preservation Louisville started a Save Our Shotguns program to rescue vacant ones. And now? Some of them are the most charming small houses in the city. There's a shotgun on Goss Avenue that serves breakfast and pizza.

The houses didn't stay on their arm of the K.

The mansion became a boarding house, then a nursing home, then a museum. The workers' cottage became a pizza place and a first-time buyer's front door. The houses didn't decide what they were worth. The city around them did, over and over again.

I pulled the MLS this week. (The MLS is the Multiple Listing Service, the database agents use to list homes for sale.)

There are 119 single-family homes for sale in Jefferson County where the listing agent tagged the style as "shotgun." The median asking price is about $139,000. Seventy-three of them, about three out of every five, are asking under $200,000.

There are 22 single-family homes for sale in the Old Louisville preservation district. The median asking price is $409,000. The top one is a nine-bedroom built in 1888, asking $2.795 million.

Same city. Roughly three times the price. A few miles apart, just like 1895.

(Quick caveat: agents choose the style tag, so not every shotgun on the market is labeled as one. The real number is probably a little higher.)

Now put that next to last Friday's numbers. Under $200,000, sales were down 22% from last year. Over $600,000, sales were up 14%. Most of these shotguns live on the bottom arm of the K right now. That's where the market slowed down the most, and it's where the tired sellers are.

So what do you do with this?

If you're a first-time buyer: a shotgun is one of the most affordable ways to own a house close to downtown, walking distance to coffee, restaurants and the river. Small lot, small yard, small utility bill. Ask the seller to help with your closing costs. Ask about a rate buydown, where the seller pays money up front to lower your interest rate. And get a real inspection. These are 100-year-old houses. Bathrooms were often added decades later, sometimes not well. Look hard at the foundation, the wiring, the roof and the drainage.

If you're an investor: remember, a lot of shotguns were built to be rentals in the first place. They've been doing that job for over a century. A double-barrel is a built-in house hack. Live on one side, rent the other, and let your tenant help pay your mortgage. A camelback gets you an extra bedroom on the same skinny lot.

If you love the big Victorians: a lot of them are already split into two to eight units, which makes them commercial property. Know going in that Old Louisville is a local preservation district, so changes to the outside of the house go through the city's Landmarks review. It’s a mess! Budget time for that. Old houses also mean slate roofs, built-in box gutters, plaster walls, and sometimes old knob-and-tube wiring. And if you're restoring a qualifying historic building, there are federal and Kentucky historic tax credits that can give back part of what you spend. Talk to your CPA, or mine, they are great!

Here's my takeaway.

The K isn't new, and it isn't permanent. Louisville drew one 140 years ago in limestone and brick and wood. And the two arms have traded places more than once since then.

The castle at the top of the K became a boarding house. The cottage at the bottom became something people stand in line for.

I said this a few weeks ago and I'll keep saying it: the more you know about a place, the more it's worth to you. Most people drive past a row of shotguns or a turret on Fourth Street and never think about it again. Now you know whose money built it, who lived in it, and how many times its value got rewritten.

So go see it. Walk Belgravia Court. Tour the Conrad-Caldwell House. Then drive over to Mellwood Avenue and look at Stecker's cottages. Same trade. Same era. Two sides of the same city, still standing.

📊 Yesterday's poll: Which hobby are you missing? The one that makes you feel won with 44%. Got all three, thanks took 33%, and the one that makes you move and the one that makes you think tied at 11% each. So I'm not the only one who needs to work on the emotional one. Good. We can hold each other to it.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

📋 Got one more minute? Once a month I ask five quick questions about where Louisville real estate is headed: prices, what's in your way, and whether you're buying or selling. Take this month's Louisville Real Estate Pulse, and I'll share what everybody said right here.

🏆 Some of the best deals on the MLS right now are 100-year-old houses that nobody's looked at twice. Every morning I rank the five best deals in Louisville and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you. Reply "FIVE."

Warmly,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

PS: I wrote us a jingle. It's called Here at Winner. Preparation meets opportunity meets AI, and that's where Winners thrive. If you're an agent and that sounds like you, you can come along if you like: come be a Winner.

Newer agent, at any brokerage? We just started Next Up Louisville, a free community for Kentucky and Indiana agents in their first three years. A monthly mastermind, a seat at our monthly discussion night, a referral network, and people who actually pick up the phone. You don't have to switch brokerages to join.

PSS: Want to shop both arms of the K? Here are all 119 shotgun houses for sale in Jefferson County right now, and all 22 homes for sale in the Old Louisville preservation district.

PSSS: If you want to see the inside of these houses, the Old Louisville Holiday Home Tour usually happens the first weekend of December, and the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum gives tours year-round. Go once and you'll never look at a turret the same way.

PSSSS: Want the bigger picture? Our Q3 Louisville housing report is up on YouTube, and it's under three minutes. In Jefferson County, homes for sale are up 34% from a year ago, and September's median sold price is up 7.5%. While you're there, look around our YouTube channel. There's a quick market video for just about every Louisville neighborhood, and every issue of this newsletter read aloud.