Five separate warehouses went up along Louisville’s riverfront in the mid-1800s, built to store the tobacco and bourbon moving south along the Ohio River. One housed the Falls City Tobacco Bank for decades. The block became part of the West Main Street Historic District, home to the largest collection of cast-iron storefronts in the country outside Lower Manhattan, and it was listed on the National Register in 1974.
By the 1990s the warehouses sat mostly vacant. Art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson bought the block in 2006 and hired Deborah Berke Partners to convert it into the flagship 21c Museum Hotel, keeping the exposed beams and cast-iron columns while adding 91 rooms and a contemporary art museum open to the public around the clock. A gold replica of Michelangelo’s David now stands where bourbon barrels once did, on what locals call Museum Row.