You can't be a suburb of nowhere.

And that means that Downtowns are important to communities, including Louisville. 

Jeff O'Brien, executive director at the Louisville Metro Cabinet for Economic Development, made that point during Access Louisville: Heart of the City, a live event put on by Louisville Business First on Feb. 5 at the Baird Conference Center at 500 W. Jefferson Street. 

The event doubled as a live recording of the Access Louisville podcast. 

Lee Weyland, of Core Real Estate, Hank Hillebrand, of the Poe Cos., and Rebecca Fleischaker, of the Louisville Downtown Partnership were on the show as well. Louisville Business First Senior Reporter Joel Stinnett moderated the discussion.

The panel spoke about the importance of development in Louisville's urban core, not just in downtown but also NuLu, Butchertown and elsewhere. 

It was a particularly timely discussion considering all the recent news on new developments.

On Tuesday, Feb. 3, Louisville-based Poe Cos. announced it had officially signed a letter of intent to purchase the Humana Building at 500 W. Main St. and convert it into a 1,000-room hotel. (Business First exclusively reported Poe Cos. plans on Dec. 12.) 

And only a few weeks ago Business First reported that Indianapolis-based Ghoman Group has secured franchise approval to bring a JW Marriott hotel to the 26-story 401 S. 4th St. Tower — formerly the Brown & Williamson Tower — at 401 S. Fourth St.

So we weren't short on things to talk about. Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, which are linked above.

Access Louisville: Heart of the City: Our next live podcast is 4 p.m. Feb. 5. Join us as we talk about development within Louisville's urban core with Lee Weyland, of Core Real Estate, Hank Hillebrand, of the Poe Cos., and Rebecca Fleischaker, of the Louisville Downtown Partnership. Details and registration here.

Imagine if Louisville landed three new hotel towers.

Seems far fetched, right? But there are actually three such projects floating around out there. We talk about those on this week's Access Louisville podcast. The latest (and focus of the show) is a recently unveiled plan for a J.W. Marriott at 4031 S. 4th Street (formerly known as Brown & Williamson Tower). 

Indianapolis-based Ghoman Group has secured franchise approval to bring a JW Marriott hotel to the 26-story structure, which is in the middle of Fourth Street Live. The company has said construction is set to begin “soon” with an opening date set for sometime in 2027. There are some unanswered questions, though, including how much that renovation would cost.

Just that project would be a big win for the city. But, as we discuss the Humana Building, on Main Street, is also being eyed to be converted into a 1,000-room hotel, according to multiple sources familiar with the project. As Business First reported last month, Louisville-based Poe Cos. is in the planning stages of the project, which could include the construction of an additional tower.

Two hotels in two existing towers would be huge. But as Business First falso reported in 2024, developer Zyyo is also planning to build a new 27-story, $175 million Downtown tower called One Forty West, which will feature a 300-room hotel. 

What are the chances that all three of these hotel projects happen? We talk about it.

After a break we go over some restaurant news, including the next chapter for a Louisville classic, Soupy's; and a new steakhouse coming to Clifton, called Mill Iron 4. We also go over a new taqueria coming to Butchertown, called Chica's Cantina, and a bankruptcy filing from the company behind Twin Peaks. 

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Access Louisville: Heart of the City: Our next live podcast is 4 p.m. Feb. 5. Join us as we talk about development within Louisville's urban core with Lee Weyland, of Core Real Estate, Hank Hillebrand, of the Poe Cos., and Rebecca Fleischaker, of the Louisville Downtown Partnership. Details and registration here.

Few people in Louisville probably know the overlap between art and business better than Ben Robinson.

Robinson, a singer-turned-CEO, was appointed as general director and CEO of the Kentucky Opera in November. We get a chance to catch up with him this week on Access Louisville, a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First.

Robinson is not only an accomplished singer but a stage director and arts executive who brings creative vision, operational expertise and a deep commitment to opera as a community-building force, a release announcing his hire last year said. He replaced former CEO Barbara Lynne Jamison. Peggy Kriha Miller has been leading in an interim capacity.

Most recently, Robinson was general director of Anchorage Opera in Alaska and managing director of Lyric Fest in Philadelphia. 

On this week's show, he talks about his first season at the reigns.

Louisville has always been a community that places a clear value on the arts, he said.

"Great arts and a great foundation for arts supports great businesses," he said. "It attracts people to this area. It helps build an economy." 

Right now there's a lot of energy particularly at peer organizations and everyone seems to want to work together on projects that are mutually beneficial, Robinson tells us.

"It's all audience focused. And we have one of the greatest audiences here and they are sophisticated and interested in supporting great art. It's an awesome thing to come into," he said.

He also talked about the business side of his role.

"It's never anything other than a 50-50 balancing act between rewarding and horrifying," he said, jokingly. 

The economic impact of arts organizations should never be under estimated, yet they tend to stay in a constant fiscal crunch. He said he views his job with an integrated approached to both arts and business. 

If we don't put on great programing that serves as the engine to the whole machine "then we're not doing the job the right way." With that, he's always looking at the organization's resources, where revenue is coming from as well as expenses.

You can hear more in the full interview in the player above or where ever you get podcasts. 

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, which are linked above. You can also listen in the player above.

Join us live: KY Inno's annual Startups to Watch Awards highlights early-stage companies that are poised to make big moves in the coming year. Join us 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 27 at the Ice House, 226 E Washington St. Tickets for the event are available here.

A plan for the future of the Mid City Mall site seems to be taking shape. But is it good enough? 

We talk about it on this week's Access Louisville podcast. 

The plan hasn't been fully revealed but there is plenty of information out there. Most recently, LBF Senior Reporter Joel Stinnett reported that The Metts family, which owns the property at 1250 Bardstown Road, is partnering in a joint venture with Atlanta-based Branch Properties to redevelop the site, according to the agenda for an upcoming Highland Commerce Guild meeting. Branch Properties develops, operates and invests in grocery-focused retail properties, according to its website. The majority of its portfolio, which spans eight states in the Southeast, consists of Publix-anchored properties, including a planned shopping center in Richwood, Kentucky, near Cincinnati.

In July, Stinnett also reported that a zoning certification filing made with Louisville Metro Planning and Design called for the construction of a grocery store and six standalone retail buildings on the property.

We're not throwing shade at the prospect of a new Publix or new retail. Lord knows there's a need for more grocery stores inside the Watterson Expressway. 

But this is a huge site in the middle of a vibrant urban neighborhood. Where's the 10-story tower? The parking garage? Is there a movie theater and a library branch in the plan — because we had that at the old site and everyone seemed to like it. LBF Editor-in-Chief Shea Van Hoy recently penned an opinion column saying he'd like to see high-density residential redevelopment mixed with ground-level retail/commercial.

You can hear our thoughts on what's been revealed on the show. It could be that this plan would just be the easiest thing to develop.

After the Mid City Mall talk, we also chat about recovery efforts following the Nov. 4 crash of UPS Flight 2976. Reporter Michael L. Jones and Digital Editor Zak Owens recently took a tour of the restricted site, which is just south of Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, and they tell us about what they saw and the latest with the cleanup effort.

Finally, we wrap up this week's show with sponsored content featuring LBF President & Publisher Lisa Benson, who has an interview with Ross Mayfield, private wealth manager at Baird. Baird is the sponsor of the Access Louisville podcast.

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

Access Louisville: Heart of the City: Our next live podcast is 4 p.m. Feb. 5. Join us as we talk about development within Louisville's urban core with Lee Weyland, of Core Real Estate, Hank Hillebrand, of the Poe Cos., and Rebecca Fleischaker, of the Louisville Downtown Partnership. Details and registration here.

We've unplugged our crystal ball, waited five minutes, then plugged it back in. 

Surely, now, we'll be able to see the future. 

As we have the last few years, we start another year of the Access Louisville podcast by making predictions for what we think will happen in the area over the next 12 months. 

We tackle a large range of topics in our predictions — construction, sports, business trends, bourbon and more. You'll have to listen in on your favorite podcast streaming app to hear all of them but here are just a few to give you a taste: 

• Greater Louisville Inc. will change its name. It's role and collaboration with Louisville Economic Development Authority is being reconsidered, after all.
• We'll see 10 or more homes sold at greater than $2 million. They have been steadily climbing, including with one coming in around $7 million recently.
• AC/DC will headline Louder than Life this year? We're all hoping that one is true for the major music festival. 
• A deal will be struct to move JBS Swift out of Butchertown. The neighborhood has changed and developed a lot in the last decade.
• We've even got a few political predictions. (A gubernatorial bid for Sen. Robert Stivers, perhaps?)
• Also, more bankruptcies in the bourbon industry? There have been a few in recent years after all.

Keep in mind these are just predictions based on familiarity with trends and stories in the area. 

The predictions show is a favorite Access Louisville tradition. On this week's show we also look back at the predictions we made around this time last year to see what we got right and what we got wrong.

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. It's available on popular podcast services, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Against the Grain wound down its operations at Louisville Slugger Field in late December.

This week on the Access Louisville podcast, we chat with Sam Cruz, one of the founders of the brewery, about the closure and what's next for the Louisville beer brand.The company had been at Louisville Slugger Field for 14 years. It announced the closure in a Facebook post recently, saying its lease at the ballpark is expiring and it has opted not to renew. The restaurant’s last day was Tuesday, Dec. 23.

Losing the space is like letting go of a "living memory," Cruz tells us on the show. But he's not sad about it.

"Its hard to be sad about evolution," he said. "Life changes. Our company and us as people we've grown and evolved and the restaurant has kinda run its course. It's time to look beyond that. I felt really comfortable ... being able to land the plane as oppose to holding on and potentially crashing at some point." 

In recent years, Cruz and business partner Jerry Gnagy bought out two previous partners in Against the Grain, and those two partners had been handling the restaurant side of the business, Cruz said. The brewery has had a production facility in Portland for about a decade now. 

With the previous partners out and the alcohol industry as a whole in decline, Against the Grain has been working on a pivot toward production. In particular, they've been working on diversifying their abilities as a production company for different beverages. 

"We could do soda or we could do a packaged water. We're going to get into coffees and products like that. So the future for us is over the next year at the very least is building on that portfolio of contract clients that we have," he tells us.

You can hear the full interview during the episode.  

Against the Grain closed its Highlands Public House in August 2024, citing a challenging lease renewal and shifting neighborhood economics. 

In 2022, it shuttered the Sandwich Emporium Downtown and parted with The Whirling Tiger music venue in Butchertown, later sold to new operators. Earlier this year we reported the company launched a new line of THC beverages called ZAZA. The brand is available in Kentucky and Southern Indiana, and regionally in the Chicago-area.

Against the Grain is the second-largest brewer of beer in Metro Louisville with 5,000 barrels produced locally last year. 

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, which are linked above. You can also listen in the player above.

A deal that would see the Humana Building, at 500 W. Main Street, redeveloped as a large hotel, seems to be cooking behind the scenes.

LBF Senior Reporter Joel Stinnett broke the story recently and joins us on the Access Louisville podcast to tell us about what he's learned. 

As reported on Dec. 12, Louisville-based Poe Cos. is in the planning stages to convert the 26-story Humana Building into a 1,000-room hotel, according to multiple sources familiar with the project. The tower is located at 500 W. Main St., near Louisville's Belvedere, Museum Row and the KFC Yum Center. 

To reach 1,000 rooms, an additional tower may be constructed behind the existing tower, near or where The Exchange office space and Vincenzo's restaurant now sit, according to at least one source. The existing tower would be converted to house the majority of the rooms, the sources said.

On the show, Stinnett tells us how his reporting on the matter came together, other projects the Poe Cos. has in the works and what the needs look like with hotels in Downtown Louisville. We also go over what might happened next. 

Later in the show we chat about the landscape for electric vehicles going forward. 

This is in the wake of the news that Ford is pulling back on EV plans, dissolving its battery manufacturing venture with SK On (called BlueOvalSK) and repurposing its recently opened battery manufacturing facility in Glendale, Kentucky. As part of the repurposing, BlueOvalSK is laying off all its Glendale workers. A Ford subsidiary plans to takeover the plant and repurpose it for battery energy storage. 

It's a complicated situation for the automaker being as it just announced a new manufacturing platform at Louisville Assembly Plant in August in support of a new midsize EV pickup truck with a $30,000 price tag (low for the EV market.) Plans for that truck are still on, Ford says.

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Louisville got a major economic development announcement recently with the news that multinational tech giant Foxconn is opening up a facility here — but it does raise some questions.

We talk about what we know — and what we don't know— on this week's Access Louisville podcast.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and other officials announced on Tuesday, Dec. 9, that Foxconn Technology USA Corp. — the American subsidiary of Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Co. Ltd. — would invest $173 million to launch a manufacturing operation in Jefferson County, creating 180 full-time jobs. 

In a news release, Beshear called it the company's first U.S. manufacturing operation, but that doesn't appear to be the case. 

The other main question we're wrestling with is what products are going to be made at Foxconn's local facility, which is planned at 6675 Randy Coe Lane. 

The company has not confirmed anything officially, though there are some hints.

The Foxconn discussion is just one part of the podcast this week. 

We also chat about closure of Angel's Selfie Museum, located near the KFC Yum Center just off Whiskey Alley. We discuss our recent coverage on how immigration policy changes are impacting the workforce. And we talk about a new golf simulator, Five Iron Golf, which opened in Downtown Louisville.

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We've got a classic restaurant news update on this week's Access Louisville podcast.

We start things off by talking about Mashup Food Hall, which opened its doors at 750 E. Jefferson St. recently. Part of the $115 million NuLu Yard development from Weyland Ventures, Mashup Food Hall is home to six local vendors, including Dipped & Drizzled and Mable’s Southern Kitchen, Barcelona Bistro Bar, 721 Mint It! Herb & Juice Bar, Nexus Bar Bites (formerly Happy Belly Bistro), Wiltshire Pantry Bakery & Café and Cold Stone Bagels.

We also talk about a couple of recent closures around town, including Fizz District in Crescent Hill and OutCast Fish & Oyster Bar in New Albany. 

We also hear about a new location for Maya Bagel Express, a New York-style bagel restaurant, which opened at 2513 Preston Highway on the edge of Germantown. The more than 3,000-square-foot space was previously occupied by a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that closed in August.

Following a break, LBF Senior Reporter Joel Stinnett gives us a break down on the state of Downtown office space. CBRE’s November Downtown Louisville SkyView report shows there is more than 1.8 million square feet of vacant space inside Downtown towers, representing a 40.2% direct vacancy rate, up from 35% one year ago.

After that, Reporter Olivia Estright tells us about Actors Theatre's plan to bring back its classic, "A Christmas Carol" this year. And Reporter Michael L. Jones tells us about the newly renovated Portland Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. 

Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A potential revamp of the Belvedere, along Louisville's waterfront, has been a big priority for Mayor Craig Greenberg. And it's a topic that got a lot of people talking thanks to a bold early design (which has now been abandoned.) 

We get an in-depth update on the project this week on the Access Louisville podcast via an interview with Layla George, who's managing the reimagining effort.

In an interview with LBF Editor-in-Chief Shea Van Hoy, George talks about what she's heard from the public since that initial design from Heatherwick Studio came out early this year. People had strong opinions about it, but as she explains, the idea has been scrapped because of the structural work it would have required. Now project officials are looking at what's next for the site.

"There's so much potential to the site that's untapped right now," she said. "We are long overdue for Belvedere version 3.0." 

Those behind the project have certain amenities they want to see up there, she explains — a covered stage, shade, seating, a walking path and a better, more accessible connection to the Ohio River.

A new design is currently under development and could be released by February. Officials are working through the cost estimates before releasing new designs, she said. 

George said she visited around 50 parks and public spaces in cities across the country for design inspiration. Interestingly, though, many places that featured beautiful landscape design were empty. And so, she explains on the show "success really looks like a lot of people using the space, all the time." 

Two strong examples from her travels she shouted out were Klyde Warren Park in Dallas and Discover Green in Houston. They were both of which were packed during times where no special events were going on — just daily life, she explained.

"Those two parks were models for me. After seeing that, I thought, we can absolutely do that at the Belvedere." 

You can hear more in the interview itself. Access Louisville is a weekly podcast from Louisville Business First. You can follow it on popular podcast services including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, which are linked above. You can also listen in the player above.