The Grand Dame of Louisville has been raising her velvet curtain for a century. The W. L. Lyons Brown Theatre at 315 West Broadway opened on 5 October 1925 with Elsie Janis in the revue Puzzles of 1925, built by hotel magnate J. Graham Brown beside his adjacent Brown Hotel and modeled on New York's famous Music Box Theatre - an ornate Neo-Classical house by architect Preston J. Bradshaw with a fan-shaped auditorium, a lavish lobby and a 40-by-40-foot stage that Louisville boasted was the equal o.....

An eighteen-year-old named Cassius Clay won a six-round decision over Tunney Hunsaker here in 1960 - the first professional fight of the man who became Muhammad Ali. Freedom Hall, at 937 Phillips Lane on the Kentucky Exposition Center grounds five miles south of downtown Louisville, opened in 1956 with a name chosen from 6,500 entries in a statewide essay contest won by a high school senior. The building was designed, unusually, around horses: the Kentucky State Fair World's Championship Horse .....

Two of America's biggest festivals call this expanse of the Kentucky Exposition Center home: Louder Than Life, the nation's largest rock festival, and Bourbon and Beyond, its bourbon-and-music twin. The Highland Festival Grounds, at 937 Phillips Lane beside Louisville International Airport, are the purpose-configured festival site of the KY Expo Center - hundreds of acres of stages, lawns and infrastructure hosting more than 300,000 attendees each September. Promoter Danny Wimmer Presents built.....

Muhammad Ali won his first professional fight here; Elvis, the Rolling Stones and Elton John played here; and every August some 600,000 Kentuckians arrive for fried chicken, bourbon and livestock. The Kentucky Exposition Center, at 937 Phillips Lane beside Louisville's airport, is the sixth-largest facility of its kind in the United States - 1.3 million square feet of indoor space on over 520 acres. The project took six years and a war to finish: the State Fair Board bought 396 acres in 1950 fo.....

It is one of college sport's rare single-sport arenas: a Division I venue built, renovated and named for volleyball alone. L&N Federal Credit Union Arena, at the corner of Floyd Street and Brandeis Avenue on the University of Louisville campus, is the 1,100-seat home of the Cardinals' women's volleyball program - one of the most consistently dangerous teams in the ACC. The venue opened in 1991 as Cardinal Arena, attached to the northeast corner of the Swain Student Activities Center; the progra.....

The stadium stands on the exact site where its sponsor was born: L&N Federal Credit Union started in 1954 serving railroad workers at the L&N Railroad's South Louisville Shops - and seven decades later put its name on the 60,800-seat football cathedral built over those same rail yards. L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium, at 2800 South Floyd Street, is the home of University of Louisville football. The stadium opened on 5 September 1998 after a decade of planning, a 135-million-dollar build that g.....

A handsome mid-sized music venue in downtown Louisville, the Mercury Ballroom occupies a historic building on South Fourth Street and has become one of the city's favoured rooms for live music. Set within the central entertainment district, the venue fills an important niche between the city's small clubs and its arenas, offering a polished, atmospheric space for touring and local acts across a wide range of genres. The venue is a flexible general-admission room holding around six hundred peopl.....

A bourbon brand and a performing arts centre built a rock hall together. Old Forester's Paristown Hall, at 724 Brent Street in Louisville, opened on 23 July 2019 with a sold-out Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue show and gave the city the mid-sized venue it had been routing tours around. The partnership was strategic: Kentucky Performing Arts - operator of the Kentucky Center downtown - led the 12-million-dollar project with Old Forester as naming partner, anchoring a 33-million-dollar arts di.....

A ceiling of midnight-blue sky scattered with twinkling stars arches over the auditorium of the Louisville Palace, the surviving masterpiece of downtown Louisville's old theatre row. The Palace opened on 1 September 1928 as the Loew's and United Artists State Theatre, reportedly built for around two million dollars and designed by the Austrian-American architect John Eberson in his signature atmospheric style. Eberson's genius lay in conjuring an outdoor Spanish courtyard indoors: the seats are.....

It is rare to drink in a bar your grandfather drank in, and rarer that the place got cooler in the meantime. Zanzabar, at 2100 South Preston Street just north of Eastern Parkway in Louisville, opened as the Zanzibar dive bar in 1938, and its distinctive Z still marks the building nearly ninety years on. The original closed in the 1980s and the space drifted through catering years as Nord's Brown Bag until 2008, when the Wettig brothers revived it as Zanzabar - keeping the 1950s fixtures and mid.....