Louisville's intimate stage honours the man who built its opera from scratch. The Moritz von Bomhard Theater is the smaller of the two principal houses inside the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts at 501 West Main Street, which opened on 19 November 1983 to a glittering downtown premiere - Diane Sawyer presenting, Charlton Heston among the guests - after years of civic debate over the 33.5-million-dollar project. The theater's namesake founded the Kentucky Opera in 1952 and nurtured it for.....

Louisville put its two exports - bourbon and a good time - under one downtown roof. Bourbon Hall at 116 West Jefferson Street sits adjacent to the Omni Hotel and the Downtown Marriott in the heart of the city, an 18,500-square-foot concert and event hall that bills itself as Louisville's premier medium-size venue: standing capacity around 2,500, three bars pouring a deliberately deep collection of premium Kentucky bourbons alongside craft beer and cocktails, and a state-of-the-art sound system s.....

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.....

The oldest continuously held major sporting event in America runs beneath two spires designed by a 24-year-old draftsman as an afterthought. Churchill Downs at 700 Central Avenue in Louisville opened on 17 May 1875, when Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. - grandson of the explorer William Clark - staged the first Kentucky Derby before 10,000 spectators, won by the chestnut colt Aristides with Black trainer Ansel Williamson and Black jockey Oliver Lewis. Clark had toured Epsom and Longchamp in 1.....

Kentucky's most visited attraction is not a racetrack or a distillery - it is a single block of Fourth Street in downtown Louisville. Fourth Street Live, spanning Fourth between Liberty Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, is the Cordish Companies' 350,000-square-foot dining and entertainment district, opened on 1 June 2004 and drawing over four million visitors a year. The block carries sixty years of urban-renewal archaeology: Fourth Street was Louisville's great shopping promenade before becom.....

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 .....

During Prohibition, big bands rehearsed in this hall while the public watched and sipped "medicinal" bourbon allegedly bottled on the property. Headliners Music Hall, at 1386 Lexington Road in Louisville's Irish Hill neighbourhood, occupies a 1907 distillery cafeteria building - and since July 1998 has been the city's definitive mid-size music venue. The building's past is written on its walls, literally: the decorative murals lining the hall date to 1939, commissioned by the National Distiller.....

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 the largest arena in America built primarily for basketball - 22,090 seats on the Ohio River, with a roof that cascades toward the water like the falls the city was founded on. The KFC Yum! Center, at 1 Arena Plaza in downtown Louisville, opened on 10 October 2010 as the home of the University of Louisville Cardinals. The arena was a generation's civic project: after decades atop Louisville's wish list, a state task force launched the 238-million-dollar build in 2005-06, with Populous des.....

On Louisville's celebrated Museum Row, the KMAC Museum, known fully as the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, occupies a row of historic cast-iron storefronts along West Main Street. A contemporary art museum with a particular devotion to craft and making, it sits amid one of the densest concentrations of cultural attractions in the city, and its setting in restored nineteenth-century commercial buildings lends it a distinctive, intimate character. The museum's programme blends fine art with the.....