Twenty years ago, the future of downtown Louisville, Kentucky’s Whiskey Row was hard to see. The block-long stretch of historic buildings dating back to the mid-to-late 1800s was largely empty after a period of stagnancy.
Boarded windows covered vacant buildings once part of a proud bourbon heritage along Main Street ― an area that saw bourbon barrels flow from Kentucky distilleries onto steamboats and railcars to consumers across the globe.