Hello, and welcome to Growing Gardenside, a blog post about a Lexington, Kentucky suburban neighborhood. While today we think of Gardenside as a large, mid-century modern, suburb, it didn’t start that way. We will see how, and why, a nineteenth-century agricultural landscape was transformed into the neighborhood we know today. I also hope to be able to offer suggestions about how we might be able to link Gardenside’s past to its  future.

Unlike many history blogs, I use an architectural lens to tell Gardenside’s story. I am a folklorist and architectural historian with over thirty years of experience reading the built environment of the United States–buildings, cultural landscapes, spaces, and material culture. I am currently working on a book, Unsettling the Appalachian Settlement School: An Architectural History, for the University Press of Kentucky.

In 2013, my partner and I purchased a home in the Greater Gardenside area of Lexington; one of the city’s largest collections of mid-century modern architecture. While my work has allowed me to document, research, and analyze thousands of homes across the country, I finally have time to study the neighborhood I call home. I am happy to share my findings with you on this website. I hope you enjoy reading about Gardenside as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing about it.

While I use archival resources–maps, historical photographs, newspaper articles, builders journals, architectural drawings, etc.–and the built environment itself, interviews often provide me the most valuable insight. If you have information to share, I hope you will let me know. If you have a suggestion of a topic you’d like me to research and answer here on the blog, contact me. I obviously can’t do them all, but I’d be happy to give it a try when I think enough people will benefit and I can fit it in. And if you have a historic photograph, architectural drawing, an old diary, or another historical document that you think might belong here, I’d love to see it.

I will continue to periodically add blog posts to this site. The frequency of my posts will depend on my other work and life commitments. If you want to receive an email notification when I publish a new post, so you don’t have to keep checking here, enter your email address in the sidebar. Happy reading!