A mile from where I grew up stands the Crescent Hill Free Public Library. It was built along Frankfort Avenue in 1905, one of over a thousand U.S. libraries built on money from none other than Andrew Carnegie. I didn’t know that at the time, nor did I understand the architecture was a shining example of Beaux-Arts style. To me, that building was a castle full of books.
Crescent Hill sprung up in the 1850s as Frankfort Avenue, then the Louisville and Lexington Turnpike, cut eastward. Because Louisville has always embraced a certain style, the houses and churches that came in were ornate. Streetcar lines followed. This new suburb prospered.
Until it didn’t.
By the time I came along, Louisville’s gateway era was over. Crescent Hill had evolved into middle-class bohemian meets rough around the edges. To get to the Library, the left onto Frankfort was a seedy corner joint with blacked-out windows. The theater a few doors down showed X-rated flicks.
But oh, that weird charm, that ten minutes from anywhere location. By my college days, great bars and restaurants were returning along Frankfort.
Years later and two hundred miles away, I decided to try my hand at short fiction. One of my drivers was to write stories with huge doses of character. In 2012, I must’ve written a publishable one, because a Canadian lit journal made it my first acceptance.
In that story, an engineer named Vi Celucci battles corporate shelving algorithms to maintain her grocery shopping regimen. This fictional store sits a short hop from Crescent Hill, as inspired by the Clifton institution revered as Dirty Kroger. My dad shopped there religiously, and so did I when I got an apartment not far off.
Vi is tough, smart, and cursed with a glorious flaw. She can only see this imperfect world through her industrial engineer lens. Everything can be optimized—should be optimized—and, once done, managed. Back then I’d been working with my share of industrial engineers, and wonderful as they are, they’re of a breed.
Pro tip: Go find one and make them your friend. You’ll get more things done.
With Vi, I took that engineer mindset, tossed in my own stickler impulses, and cranked the mix, a la Spinal Tap, to eleven. Someone that obsessed with rules and efficiency can’t let anything go. Anything, and it costs them. The torrent of minor failings, the constant wheedling of supposed underperformers, the inevitable let-downs, the surrender to intellectual compromise. All of it would be exhausting.
I’d thought Vi could make a fun amateur sleuth. I let her loose after a counterfeiting scam around Crescent Hill that taxes her last nerves. That must’ve worked, too. AHMM ran “Two Bad Hamiltons and a Hirsute Jackson” in 2015.
Then I didn’t write Vi again. No story idea screamed for her. A Vi story can’t have a crime so serious it spoils the tone. And like her neighborhood, a Vi crime has to be weird, something tiny but torturing to her perfectionist soul.
Eventually, inspiration struck. You might’ve heard that horse racing is big in Louisville. So big, in fact, that a whole charity effort sponsors fanciful horse statues around town. Each statue—and there have been hundreds—has a unique theme that ranges from whimsical to flat-out gorgeous, and each stands as commissioned sidewalk art until they’ve run their race, so to speak. Such a unique feature along Frankfort Avenue would be a landmark Vi latches onto full bore.
So I put a Plexiglas Horse a block from the Crescent Hill Free Public Library. Then, I had someone steal it. Vi’s ensuing Kentucky-fried odyssey forces her to sift through the noise and discover what really matters. Eight years later, Vi is back in AHMM.
I still get up to Louisville often. While polishing “Know Thyself,” I walked Frankfort Avenue up and back. The high times are doing fine, with legit hip and enough pubs for a proper crawl. That castle of a library is much smaller than I remember, inside and out. I donated an armload of books, some with my stories in them.
Life is complicated. We feel better when our feet are on familiar turf, somewhere we have a semblance of control. Offbeat as Vi is, we all have some of her in us deep down. We all reach out for familiar turf. We need to understand where we’ve been, where we’re headed, where we’ll always belong.
Trace Evidence 