What to see after your walk
Old Louisville sits between downtown and the University of Louisville, so a 90-minute walk leaves you a short ride from most of the city's big museums. Several good follow-ups are on the route itself, though, and one of them finally takes you inside a mansion.
Go inside the Conrad-Caldwell House
None of the three main walks enters a building, which makes the Conrad-Caldwell House the natural next stop. The Richardsonian Romanesque mansion on St. James Court, built in the mid-1890s for a tanning businessman and nicknamed Conrad's Castle, is run as a museum by the St. James Court Historic Foundation. Its docent-led tours usually run Thursday to Sunday and last about an hour, with adult tickets roughly $15–20. Days and prices change, so check with the museum before you go. Visitors enter from Magnolia Avenue, and our Conrad-Caldwell House guide covers the rooms and the families who lived there.
If you would rather someone else arranged the ticket, look at David Dominé's own Glitter Ball City afternoon (~$95.40). It lasts 2.5 hours from 2:30 pm, opens with a cocktail or mocktail at a neighborhood tavern, spends about 15 minutes inside the mansion and ends with a signed copy of his true-crime memoir. Its catch is availability. It runs on only a handful of dates set around the author's schedule and has just 2 reviews. The true-crime subject also makes it an afternoon for adults rather than children.
The Filson Historical Society
The Filson Historical Society, Kentucky's historical society, occupies the Ferguson Mansion on Third Street, a classical house built between 1901 and 1905. Both Louisville Historic Tours walks pass it, and the ghost walk gathers at the Filson's brown sign at Fourth and Ormsby. Inside are exhibits and a research library. Opening days are not the same every week, so check with the Filson before you plan an afternoon around it.
Central Park and free Shakespeare
Central Park covers about 17 acres in the middle of the district. It began as the DuPont family estate and later formed part of the Southern Exposition grounds, and the Olmsted firm drew up its redesign in the early 1900s. Wandering it costs nothing, and the Visitors Center pavilion stands inside it. On summer evenings its C. Douglas Ramey Amphitheater hosts the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, which stages free outdoor plays for roughly eleven weeks from about June to August and bills itself as the longest-running non-ticketed Shakespeare festival in the US. The festival publishes which play is on each night.
Two events change the neighborhood completely. The St. James Court Art Show fills the streets around the court with hundreds of artists' stalls, usually on the first full weekend of October, and draws very large crowds. In early December the Visitors Center promotes its Holiday Home Tour, when decorated private homes open to visitors. Our guide to the best time to walk covers both.
South to the Speed and Churchill Downs
The University of Louisville campus begins just south of Old Louisville, and on it stands the Speed Art Museum, Kentucky's largest art museum. From the walking tours' corner it is a short ride, which makes it an easy afternoon after a morning walk. Its hours vary through the week, so look them up with the museum before heading over.
A few miles further south, the Kentucky Derby Museum stands beside Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. It is a drive or a rideshare rather than a walk. Derby week fills hotels and pushes up prices across Louisville, which matters if you hoped to fit walking tours into the same trip.
North to downtown
Downtown begins a mile or two north of Old Louisville. The Louisville Slugger Museum and the bourbon tasting rooms of Whiskey Row draw most visitors, and city buses run along Fourth Street between the two areas. By day the walk from the downtown hotels takes about 20 to 25 minutes. After an evening ghost walk, a car is the easier way back, and our getting-there guide has the bus and parking details.
Start the day with the houses
The 11 am history walk leaves from Fourth and Ormsby and finishes on the same corner by about 1 pm, a few minutes from the Filson and the Conrad-Caldwell House. Plans can still change on GetYourGuide until a day before, which Viator does not allow for this walk.
Coffee, lunch and a bed in a mansion
Cafes and restaurants line Fourth Street and the blocks around Magnolia Avenue, close enough to the meeting corner for lunch between two walks. We leave the choosing to you, since openings and menus change faster than this page.
Several of the big Victorian houses now run as bed and breakfasts, the most direct way to spend time in an Old Louisville interior without a ticket. The Visitors Center walk passes one of them, the Louisville Bourbon Inn, on its way back down Fourth Street. Staying in the district puts both meeting points within a few minutes on foot, and after the ghost walk it means no drive home. Old Louisville's history explains how so many mansions came to be split up and later restored.
A full day in Old Louisville
- 11 am. The history and architecture walk at ~$26.50, or the Visitors Center walk at ~$20 if you would rather start in Central Park;
- About 1 pm. Lunch on Fourth Street or near Magnolia Avenue;
- Afternoon. A docent tour of the Conrad-Caldwell House if it is open that day, or the Speed Art Museum a short ride south;
- Early evening. Dinner close to the meeting corner, or in summer an evening of free Shakespeare in Central Park in place of the ghost walk;
- 7:30 pm. The ghost walk at ~$25 from the Filson sign at Fourth and Ormsby.
That plan books two walks that share a few stops, and our day-or-night guide explains why reviewers still enjoy both. Families with young children may prefer to swap the evening for the park, and our guide for families covers ages and restrooms.