Positively Fourth Street?

6 p.m. on the Friday before Memorial Day — a day folks decamp for the lake or a road trip to see friends and family. At the very least, they skip out of work an hour early to begin a three-day weekend of backyard grilling and hard-core relaxation.

In 1999, the block between Liberty Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard would have been deserted by now, like much of downtown Louisville. Sure, the Galleria was perfect for buying greeting cards on your lunch hour, and skateboarders were always doing ollies on whatever benches they could find. Otherwise, few Louisvillians cared to venture downtown to shop at the Dillard's or the record store under the enormous atrium. Why would they? The same retailers did business in St. Matthews, Clarksville and Okolona, and locally owned retailers thrived on Bardstown Road. Why would anyone ever go to Fourth Street?

On this night in 2009, families amble on the sidewalks, sporting new Beatles shirts purchased at Abbey Road on the River, gazing up at the off-duty restaurant servers chatting on cell phones and leaning against the rails of the catwalks overlooking the street. They slow as they pass each prospective dinner venue — J.Gumbo's? Too spicy. The Pub? Too boozy for the little ones. Hard Rock Café? Too touristy. Sports & Social Club? RiRa? Red Star Tavern? None of these restaurants existed in May 1999. Inside the eateries and outside on their respective patios, servers hustle about, preparing for what they hope will be a crowd of diners as the evening progresses.

Tony and Christina Theile march north from Muhammad Ali Boulevard straight into RiRa. The couple re-emerge on the patio with friends, and the very fact that they're about to dine on Fourth Street amazes Christina.

“I used to go shopping here with my dad every Christmas,” said Christina, 31, as a server delivered drinks. “Really, we shopped here just because there wasn't anyone down here and there wasn't much traffic. I never would have expected this.”

The difference from the 1990s and today is Fourth Street Live, the Cordish Companies' massive renovation and re-imaging of Louisville's urban retail/entertainment core, a once-brilliant mecca that suffered years of malignant decay in the 1960s and 1970s. In June 2004, Baltimore-based Cordish tore away the construction barriers and opened Hard Rock Café, Red Star Tavern, T.G.I. Friday's and a trio of nightclubs, with a promise to open several more diners and bars and clubs. It's been five years, so has this experiment in drawing young Louisvillians and spendthrift tourists to downtown been worth it?

In 2008, about 4.5 million people visited Fourth Street Live, a number that has increased each year the venue has been open, Fourth Street Live's managers say. Most of the businesses there have hung on the whole time, which is notable when you consider that the world is in the grips of a recession. Besides, the block is often cited as an attractive factor when Louisville wins in the ultra-competitive arena of attracting conventions and trade shows, such as the ABC Kids Expo, which is expected to bring $24 million to Louisville over two years beginning in 2011.

Fourth Street Live has its costs. The city spent $4 million to buy the Galleria property (then sold it to Cordish for $1) and gave Cordish another $9 million to turn it into Fourth Street Live. While the deal called for Cordish to spend spend $70 million of its own money to renovate the property and share some of the profits with the city, the developer also gets a healthy tax rebate.

Helping to justify the arrangement was Cordish's track record for bringing in name-brand tenants at its other developments around the country. But while businesses have occupied most of the commercial space at Fourth Street Live since it opened in May 2004, it has not been an unqualified success.

Cordish has a spotty retention history with its Fourth Street Live tenants — six eateries and nightclubs have shuttered, four of them replaced by Cordish owned-and-operated enterprises. Coveted chains like ESPN Zone, a name that was bandied about when city officials were mulling the project, have declined the chance to open here. Plans to open a health club never materialized. An attempt to lure a high-end McCormick & Schmick's seafood restaurant to the adjoining Starks Building collapsed, the building's owner threatening to evict Cordish over unpaid rent. (A settlement was eventually reached.) Adding insult to injury, members of the Louisville Metro Council raised a stink when some of the $1.8 million the city lent to Cordish for the McCormick & Schmick's project was diverted to turn the defunct Lucky Strike Lanes into the Sports & Social Club.

Blake Cordish, vice president of the company founded by his grandfather, says he is unfazed by the closures and is “bullish” on Cordish's future in Louisville. There are plans to expand Fourth Street Live with a project dubbed Center City, which would include more bars, restaurants and clubs, but with an expanded focus on retail. City leaders say the expansion is set to proceed as soon as the recession eventually winds down.

“There are always going to be some level of businesses coming and going anywhere and that is healthy and natural, especially for an entertainment district,” Cordish said. “The reality is that stagnation is unhealthy and gets boring. We are always looking for ways to improve the quality and experiences that we offer our costumers and that is why, unlike a lot of developers, we are constantly reinvesting.

“For example, there has been over $5 million of private-sector investment in Fourth Street Live in the last year alone. The fact that in today's turbulent economy, when many developments are emptying, that Fourth Street Live has remained basically 100-percent leased throughout its history is the most obvious sign of the district's success.”

To achieve that figure, Cordish has taken over several of the vacant spaces and opened its own establishments — Hotel Nightclub, Tengo Sed Cantina, Angels Rock Bar and Sports & Social Club are Cordish brands. (RiRa and The Improv are run by outside companies.) That has not escaped the notice of the local blogosphere, where critics of Cordish go to find kindred spirits and fuel a backlash, albeit a small one.

One person with a lot riding on the success of Fourth Street Live is Mayor Jerry Abramson, who said he is glad to see businesses that are functioning and not boarded up — even if Cordish ends up owning the nightclub or bar in those spaces instead of soliciting an outside tenant like Hard Rock Café or Red Star Tavern. Nor does he mind that Cordish needed a taxpayer-funded loan to open Sports & Social Club.

“I don't think it's a problem, I think it's a strength,” said Abramson, one of Fourth Street Live's staunchest proponents. “When Lucky Strike was having financial problems and wasn't doing well here, they (Cordish) had the financial wherewithal and the strength to give us basically an ESPN Zone-type entertainment venue. I couldn't have done that. Here we are with the biggest space at Fourth Street Live that literally could have been boarded up, Lucky Strike, which would have had a ripple effect. ...

“Or you could work with them (Cordish) and say, ‘Here's a fund that was set up to uniquely assist new businesses to come, develop restaurants, retail, entertainment concepts, and if you stay there five years it's forgivable. We put some money in, you put some money in, but get that place opened.' It's the broken window theory. You don't want that vacant.”

Fourth Street Live represents an admission by city leaders that past efforts to turn downtown's once-bustling, premiere entertainment blocks were epic failures — because none have attracted close to the crowds the Cordish-run facility has drawn.

On a given evening, couples like the Theiles dine on the sidewalks and imbibe at the bars. Later, Hotel, Sully's and other clubs employ attractive young servers — almost all women — to sell Jell-O shots and $100-plus bottles of Grey Goose vodka. These clubs are frequently packed and populate Fourth Street well into the evening — 1 a.m. on any given Saturday, finely dressed young women and men in jeans-and-Ts are in the middle of the closed street, chatting, the unconnected would-be patrons waiting in line to enter a club. Turn the clock back 10 years, and the sidewalks of Fourth Street might have been populated by a few security guards and a homeless person or two.

Louisville and Fourth Street have a long, tangled history. In the '50s, Fourth Street boasted the city's best clothiers and movie theaters. With suburban malls and multiplexes a decade away, Louisvillians dropped their kids off at the movies and shopped at Stewart's and Selman's. The lively thoroughfare slowly died after Mall St. Matthews opened in the early '60s, serving the World War II generation and their Boomer babies, who hopped on Eisenhower's new interstate highways and relocated from urban neighborhoods to Buechel, St. Matthews, Middletown, Valley Station, Shively, Okolona and Jeffersontown. The shops closed or moved to the suburban themselves, and it wasn't long before city leaders decided to do something to save Fourth.

“I bought my clothes at Stewart's (department store), my mother went to Byck's, my mother went to Selman's,” Abramson said. “All the movies were on Fourth Street. There were some suburban movie theaters, but the big-time movies came to Fourth Street. There was a great Orange Julius on Fourth Street — I'm not sure why I remember, but I remember. It was the center of the city in terms of retail and entertainment.”

The first stab was a “pedestrian mall” — a shopping corridor closed to vehicle traffic — that opened in the early '70s. It failed. “‘Going out of business' seems to be the sign of the times on River City Mall,” led a Courier-Journal piece in 1975. Meanwhile, several prominent downtown hotels shuttered. The next brilliant idea was the Louisville Galleria. Opened in 1983 at a cost of $144 million ($308 million in today's dollars), it was an enclosed retail center that was supposed to lure shoppers away from the suburban malls. It didn't.

The Galleria limped along for 20 years. By the '90s, its businesses were doing okay during the daytime, particularly if a convention was in town. But on the weekend nights, the street was populated by the homeless, pimps and punk rockers. Fourth Street — and for the most part, downtown Louisville — was dead after sunset, a place where suburban Boomers wouldn't dare leave their kids alone.

It's useful to view Fourth Street Live the way Abramson does: The complex is a cog in a machine that should churn out even more economic development around it. Together, Fourth Street Live and the Kentucky International Convention Center create not just a reason for Louisvillians to come downtown, but they also attract tourism and conventions. Those conventions need more restaurants than Fourth Street Live has to offer, hence the recent opening of the eatery Z's Fusion at Fourth and Market. The nightclub Prime Lounge recently opened on Main Street near the downtown arena site, and the Irish pub O'Shea's is planning a location across the street. And once the arena opens, and Louisvillians stream downtown for concerts and basketball games, Abramson expects more of this development to emerge.

And it all emanates from the Fourth Street corridor. “That's been the game plan,” Abramson said.

This ripple effect is an appealing concept, but it hasn't worked perfectly. Fourth Street south of Muhammad Ali has seen several businesses come and go since 2004. Both Olive's, an Italian restaurant, and Highland Coffee have closed their Fourth Street locations, their storefronts still vacant. And although the restaurants Cunningham's, Safier and Bluegrass Brewing Company have successfully opened up close to the Louisville Palace, the Theater Square development near Fourth and Broadway has never lived up to its promise to serve as a nightlife hub.

“We wish it would have had a more advanced ripple effect, but I would blame some of that on the national economy,” Abramson said. “You can't get a loan. You can't get financing. Start up a new restaurant? Start up a new business? Were we hoping it would be more and more quickly? I would say we're excited about what we got.”

Before Fourth Street Live, if you went downtown to party, chances are your destination was O'Malley's Corner. A massive nightclub complex covering much of a city block, it housed an array of nightclubs, including the honky-tonk Coyote's and several smaller themed bars. Everyone from conventioneers to country music fans to bikers could find something fun to do there, and for almost two decades, business was pretty good.

But in April, O'Malley's Corner — renamed City Block in 2007 — closed its doors and laid off 120 full- and part-time employees. And its co-owner says he knows exactly what is to blame: Fourth Street Live.

“It was a tremendous impact for everybody in town,” said Ward Plauche, who ran O'Malley's/City Block with business partner Don Blackburn.

“I think there are a lot of people who don't want to admit defeat, they say it didn't affect them at all. Or they want to say it publicly. But we all know it did. Fourth Street Live changed the market share, and there's only so much market share in Louisville.”

Fourth Street Live bothered Plauche from the very beginning, when the administration of then-Mayor David Armstrong unveiled its plans without asking for public input. Particularly galling was the $1 lease and the tax breaks granted to the Cordish Companies. Then came the smoking ban; thanks to a covered atrium, smokers at Fourth Street Live are not forced to huddle outside on a freezing sidewalk when they need a nicotine fix.

Proponents of Fourth Street Live say the complex's negative effect on Louisville's independent businesses has been minimal. And it's hard to ignore the possibility that the Electric Cowboy, a massive honky-tonk that opened up on Dixie Highway near Pleasure Ridge Park in 2007, may have siphoned off a large chunk of O'Malley's/City Block's country-and-western crowd.

But Plauche has his mind made up. He argues that Fourth Street Live has undermined Louisville-based business owners for the sake of out-of-state carpetbaggers, who use their meager successes to demand more taxpayer support.

“I don't think anyone thinks it's successful, when you do the math,” Plauche said. “You can't just say Fourth Street's successful because it draws 5 million (people) a year.”

There is also an aesthetic argument to made against Fourth Street Live. Cordish, and proudly so, has modeled the complex after similar projects in Baltimore, Houston and Kansas City, Mo., all aimed at reviving moribund downtowns.

But that indistinct, pre-fab quality bothers some local business boosters, who are rankled by the city government's eagerness to support a facility anchored by chain restaurants and bars.

“I think that the main point of contention around Fourth Street Live from business owners is not the concept of it, but that it is not something that is uniquely Louisville,” said Summer Auerbach, marketing manager for the Louisville Independent Business Alliance.

While Auerbach concedes that Fourth Street Live has played a key role in the ongoing revitalization of downtown Louisville, some small-business owners felt shut out of the project.

“There is a lot of effort that is put out from the convention and tourism bureau to direct visitors to a place that is not exclusive to Louisville and can be found in multiple cities across the country,” said Auerbach, who is also vice president of the locally owned chain of Rainbow Blossom Natural Food Markets. “When I went to Baltimore, I was sorely disappointed when I was directed to Power Plant Live for a fun night out — and discovered that it was a spitting image of Fourth Street Live.”

The market share issue irks Abramson. He argues that Louisville's market for food, drink and entertainment is bigger than Plauche and other Fourth Street critics will admit.

“That may have been a problem at one time in this community, but because of the population that we have in this region — we are a large city — we are able to have multiple nodes of entertainment,” Abramson said. “People don't give this community the credit it deserves. We are a community of over a million people, and the nodes of entertainment and activity throughout Louisville are just fine.”

In other words, said the mayor, a community this size should be able to support both the chains and the quirkly local establishments.

“There's enough people that go to O'Charley's and Red Lobster. There's also enough people that go to family-owned restaurants like Jack Fry's or Café Metro, or the Bristol,” he said. “Does that mean one's bad and one's good? No. We have choices in this community. We didn't in the past.”

Blake Cordish agreed.

“Fourth Street Live has helped to foster numerous new developments in the downtown and has helped to grow the overall economic pie,” Cordish said, noting the complex's role in attracting conventions and trade shows. “The reality is that districts like Bardstown (Road in the Highlands) are more vibrant and successful now than before Fourth Street Live opened.”

With the number of people living downtown slowly growing — the real estate crash has delayed what planners hope will be an urban renaissance in the city — Fourth Street Live along with Center City could evolve to serve the needs of young professionals who want to live, work and play all in one place.

And while they might not move downtown specifically because of Fourth Street Live, the complex adds to the draw, said Ruth Trautwein, entertainment director for the Young Professionals Association of Louisville.

“It's a bonus,” said Trautwein, whose group occasionally hosts events at the complex. “I don't think it hurts anybody to have it down there. And I know tourists love it.”

Five years after it opened, Fourth Street Live is an astonishing success — but the bar was set low. The mere fact that people eat at its restaurants and dance at its clubs is an improvement after decades of failed revitalization efforts. Celebrities attend Derby parties there. Famous comedians crack jokes at The Improv. Thousands of people come out for free concerts by bands such as O.A.R. and Gavin DeGraw.

Yes, Fourth Street Live is chain restaurants and mostly out-of-state ownership. It was not organically grown like Bardstown Road and Frankfort Avenue. And some local business owners have suffered. But Fourth Street Live is also an estimated 2,000 jobs. It's also a reason for Louisvillians to head downtown, after decades spent shopping, eating and barhopping in other parts of town.

It's also a big something in the middle of the city, instead of a white elephant and gloomy monument to downtown's bygone vibrancy. It's a major selling point for conventioneers who want to cut loose after a day trapped in seminars and listening to sales pitches. It's a piece of a puzzle that, teamed with the arena and convention center, could spur further economic growth.

“We're doing better than most cities,” Abramson said. “Are we doing as well as we had hoped? We are not. Once the economy turns, we will.”