“You want to go to work and you want an environment where you feel safe,” Dixon said. Dixon has retooled his new location to provide more options for boxing and fitness enthusiasts, and he’s got more space, which allows him to bring more people into the gym while still following COVID-19 health restrictions. The protests added to that perception, said Dixon.
It didn’t feel safe for the kids anymore. James Dixon of TKO/Top Knotch Boxing stands beside the ring in his new location off Newburg Road outside I-264. One day he caught someone in their underwear taking a shower using the spigot on the building. He would find used needles on the ground. In the months after the gym closed, Dixon saw more and more unhoused people hanging out under the highway overpass next to his business. “Boxing at the end of the day, it’s a sport and no sport is worth somebody’s life,” said James Dixon. It was just last November that Carlos won a WBC Youth World Title in Kingston, Jamaica. It used to be housed in a grimy building off Breckenridge Street beside I-65, a couple blocks south of downtown. In the city of Muhammad Ali’s birth, James Dixon and his son Carlos carry on a proud legacy. “When Breonna Taylor’s family is paid $12 million, who is paying for that? All of us are going to pay for that.” A business owner leaves downtown We are all going to pay for that,” said Betty Baye, a former Courier Journal columnist and now part-time columnist at WLKY. “If the economic engine of the city is not running, nobody’s life is going to be good here and it doesn’t matter where you live in the city. It will take an acknowledgement of the systemic inequalities present in Louisville, and a desire to create something better, they said. It will take more than a vaccine and open windows. It’s a way to celebrate taking the boards down, a way to bring the community together to heal everyone and a way to show off our artwork,” Hudson said.Ĭity officials, artists, business owners and activists are encouraging everyone to return downtown, even as protests and the pandemic show little sign of ending.īut that return should not be a return to “normal,” they said. “We’re out here painting a Breonna Taylor mural. Mercedes Hudson said the boarded business fronts made the city feel abandoned, like a ghost town.
While many people left downtown because of the pandemic, it was the images they saw afterward that may have furthered the perception that downtown is unsafe, she said. “We have in this downtown scenario right now, some very real issues and some perception issues,” Wiederwohl said. With so many office workers now working remotely, estimates put downtown office occupancy around 20%, said Louisville Forward Chief Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, who manages the city’s economic and community development arm. Hotels, restaurants and much of the city’s hospitality industry are reeling. There are no conferences, conventions or large concerts. The drama of the protests and protesters’ interactions with police have played out against the backdrop of a downtown largely emptied by the global pandemic. So far in 2020, more than 700 people have been arrested since protests over the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd erupted in late May. The silhouette in front of Hudson held a sign reading, “I am not a threat.”Īlong here almost 60 years earlier, police arrested Black students enmasse for taking part in non-violent demonstrations protesting discrimination by downtown businesses. His locks are pulled back in a bun, and he wears the neutral garb of a painter, a cigarette between his lips. Hudson is a Black man with dreadlocks that hang down to his waist. On a recent afternoon, Mercedes Hudson tore off a piece of painter’s tape outlining a silhouette as part of a mural painted across the plywood board covering Encore on 4th Street. These plywood facades went up amid racial justice protests, and while the protests continue, people are beginning to consider what’s next for a downtown that has been battered, first by a global pandemic, then by unrest awakened by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police. Businesses in downtown Louisville have begun removing the plywood from their windows.
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