Commodore Apartment Building (Louisville, Kentucky)
Encyclopedia
The Commodore Apartment Building, also called Commodore Apartments, is a luxury condominium complex
Condominium
A condominium, or condo, is the form of housing tenure and other real property where a specified part of a piece of real estate is individually owned while use of and access to common facilities in the piece such as hallways, heating system, elevators, exterior areas is executed under legal rights...

 located in Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

's Bonnycastle neighborhood. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

.

History

The 11-story 120 ft (36.6 m) high rise
High Rise
High Rise is a 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard. It takes place in an ultra-modern, luxury high-rise building.-Plot summary:The building seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming pools, its own school, a supermarket,...

 Commodore Apartment Building was opened in 1929 and designed by the architectural firm of Joseph & Joseph in 1928. The architects designed four other buildings in the Louisville area including the Republic Building (1916) and the Elsby (1918) in New Albany, Indiana
New Albany, Indiana
New Albany is a city in Floyd County, Indiana, United States, situated along the Ohio River opposite Louisville, Kentucky. In 1900, 20,628 people lived in New Albany; in 1910, 20,629; in 1920, 22,992; and in 1940, 25,414. The population was 36,372 at the 2010 census. The city is the county seat of...

. The building is located near Cherokee Park
Cherokee Park
Cherokee Park is a municipal park located in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It was designed, like 18 of Louisville's 123 public parks, by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture...

.

The building is built on land that was once owned by Isaac Everett, one of the founders of the Galt House
Galt House
The Galt House is a 25-story, 1300-room hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The original hotel was erected in 1837. The current Galt House is presently the city's only hotel on the Ohio River. Many noted people have stayed at the Galt House, including Jefferson Davis, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln...

. Everett purchased about 150 acre (0.607029 km²) of land for $25,000 dollars (USD). The land then was used to build himself a mansion. The estate passed down to his daughter Harriet, who later married and became Harriet Bonnycastle. Which after he husbands death donated land to Louisville to build Cherokee Park
Cherokee Park
Cherokee Park is a municipal park located in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It was designed, like 18 of Louisville's 123 public parks, by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture...

 to spur future developments in 1891. Harriet would sell parcels of land for over the next twenty years and eventually in in the late 1920s the Commodore Apartments went up.

After surviving the Great Depression, and continuing as a luxury apartment building, it was sold for $650,000 and restored for another $125,000 in 1978 by Louisville native, actor and entrepreneur Roger Davis. Davis sold the Commodore in 1980 for $1,000,000 to Jack MacDonald of Acre Realty, Chicago which converted the Commodore from an apartment building to a condominium complex of 59 units.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 29, 1982.
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