LOUISVILLE, Ky. — They make a great deal of the New Louisville around here. As they should. The New Louisville is alive with development, a vibrant nightlife, high commerce. The New Louisville is fascinating.

Well, Old Louisville is pretty wonderful, too.

Columbine Bed & Breakfast (ENLARGE)
The Columbine bed-and-breakfast in Old Louisville, Ky., has had previous lives as a private mansion, Bible school and small apartment building.
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Louisville's main street has one of the best preserved districts of 19th-century storefronts in America, many with cast iron.
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Old Louisville is a complex neighborhood on the southern side of town that holds together wealth and poverty, age and freshness, urban and suburban auras, black and white, astonishingly grand old houses and astonishingly grand old houses coming apart at the seams.

It is exactly the richness of the mix, the beautiful, the fascinating, the human and the vibrant that makes this neighborhood worth as much interest as the vaunted racetracks, exciting music and busy commercial sections of the city.

They say Old Louisville defies labels. One occurs to this visitor: beautiful.

There are homes here, one after another for blocks, that create the risk of our driving into a telephone pole, so distractingly striking are they in their shape, size, vision, history and grandeur.

A walk through narrow Belgravia Court leads you through some of the most lovely buildings, green space and liveliness of spirit as you could ask for. The neighborhood's famous Central Park is a gem in itself, and site of the annual St. James Court Art Show, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each October. It also hosts the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival every June and July.

The rise, fall and rebirth of Old Louisville — the "Southern Extension" as it was first called — is a tale in itself.

Since 1817, when the Bullitt brothers bought the land, Old Louisville has been a center of history, prestige and truly amazing architecture. The region's wealthy moved in as the land, annexed into the city of Louisville in 1836, was divided and subdivided again.

Old mansions prospered here, fell into disrepair and are being revitalized again before your eyes. On tree-lined streets, stately homes have become stately bed-and-breakfasts rich in character and taste.

The bed-and-breakfast I visited, the Columbine, was over time a private home (which is to say, mansion), a Bible school and a small apartment unit. The columns, woodworking, windows and awesome central staircase are amazing in their history and presence. The food is wonderful, too.

The neighborhood's style is eclectic. If "common" weren't so inadequate a word, you'd say that examples were common of homes in Victorian Gothic, Arts and Crafts, Romanesque, Queen Anne, Italianate, Chateauesque and Beaux Arts. If, like me, you aren't really sure which is which, the Old Louisville Information Center catalogs a variety of descriptive walking tours to see and explain the stained-glass windows, turrets, gargoyles and wrought iron fences.

Old Louisville is the third-largest National Preservation District in the nation, and the largest Victorian district in the United States. The 48-block section contains three distinct historic districts, and numerous structures are carried on the National Register of Historic Places. More, there are two local preservation districts in the neighborhood.

Such efforts offer important protection for the neighborhood, which saw itself run down as the wealthy decamped after World War II, and which went downhill in the 1960s in an urban renewal boom that displaced the poor from the central city. Driven from their homes downtown, many moved to Old Louisville's large but often empty buildings.

As happens, crime and decay moved in with the folks who were down on their luck. Uprooted and exiled, the poor had neither the resources nor the capacity to do much to slow the blight that threatened to overwhelm a region seemingly rich in castles and mansions yet home to people who couldn't keep them up.

But efforts to preserve, restore and rehabilitate the neighborhood took hold. The internal energy from artists and dedicated residents got the ball rolling, and it continues to roll today.

Now, the section has a life that a visitor can feel without entirely knowing where it is coming from or where it is going. It is plenty to know that a great old part of the city has been slowly dragged back out into the sunshine.

The free St. James Court Art Show started in 1957 has grown to be one of the largest art shows of its kind in the country. It features more than 650 exhibitors and draws more than 200,000 visitors each year.

Small on its own — only 12,000 people — Old Louisville is home to major churches, social organizations and museums: the Speed Art Museum, Conrad-Caldwell House, the Sons of the American Revolution Historical Museum and the Filson Historical Society, among others.

Louisville is Kentucky's largest city, founded on the Ohio River in 1778 by George Rogers Clark, and is most famous as the home of the Kentucky Derby, wherein several horses run around in a circle at Churchill Downs. In the spring, when northern Kentucky's rich, natural revitalization explodes, Old Louisville especially glows with flowers and blossoms.

But at any season, the stately old mansions, the broad parks and beautiful gardens are enough to remind us that this old town has more to offer than horse races, baseball bats and sipping whiskey.