Reviving the neighborhood may be as easy as painting your home pink
Want to revitalize Louisville? Paint the town red. Or yellow. Or blue.
So says John Gilderbloom in his new book, “Chromatic Homes: The Joy of Color in Historic Places,” (University Press of Kentucky, $24.95).
The director of the University of Louisville’s Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods asks readers, “Can chromatic homes be the secret sauce for neighborhood and community regeneration?”
Gilderbloom, himself the owner of vibrantly painted homes, points to his own experience remodeling a Louisville Victorian off Tyler Parkway in the Highlands. Despite his extensive work on the home’s foundation, roof and plumbing, it didn’t attract renters or buyers until Gilderbloom painted it pink, red and turquoise.
While correlation is not causation, the professor also observes the high concentration of colorfully painted homes in Louisville’s Original Highlands neighborhood, where property values have jumped in recent years.
“This success should compel cities to encourage homeowners to paint drab houses with bright colors,” Gilderbloom writes. “Paint is probably the cheapest way to get ‘house proud.’ Chromatic buildings can be inexpensive and effective community economic development tools that do not require government funding, just sweat equity.”
In “Chromatic Homes,” Gilderbloom takes readers on a colorful international journey. The book’s 132 pages are crammed with 182 photographs of the world’s best polychromatic specimens, from the Painted Ladies of San Francisco to the radiant fishermen’s houses of Burano, Italy.
Among these worldly examples are Louisville’s own collection of 100-year-old Victorian houses, painted in three or more colors. These are one of the city’s greatest assets and best kept secrets, Gilderbloom says.
To build his case for color, Gilderbloom splashes the book with a number of memorable tangents throughout.
In one, he recounts the story of Art and Larry Holmer, who disobeyed orders to paint San Francisco’s cable cars a flat, military green and instead used bright reds, blues, yellows and purples. The splashes of color caused the public to appreciate the cars and preserve them, Gilderbloom argues.
Closer to home, Gilderbloom points to Louisville’s most famous chromatic home: the house in which Muhammad Ali grew up.
“Ali’s father, a house painter, outraged neighborhood residents by painting his West Louisville home pink,” Gilderbloom writes. “Like father, like son?”
Catch Gilderbloom and “Chromatic Homes” at the Cincinnati book festival Books by the Banks on Oct. 20 and at the Kentucky Book Fair in Lexington on Nov. 17. He is also holding a talk and book signing at 6 p.m. Oct. 22 at Louisville’s Filson Historical Society.
Reach reporter Alfred Miller at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @AlfredFMiller. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com.