(EDITOR’S NOTE: As this article went to press, the historic former Fayette County Courthouse – home of The Lexington History Museum – is closed and inaccessible to the public.)
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The year was 1900. The world was literally electric with the International Exposition in Paris, France. Soon, that city would gain the moniker “City of Lights” for its exuberant display of electricity.
Closer to home, Lexington – a longtime aspirant to the great cities of the world (the downtown street plan emulates Philadelphia, Cheapside is named for the London, England, marketplace) – displayed its own electric exuberance in the form of its brand new County Courthouse. The city’s nighttime sky was alit with the glow of 128 bulbs in the building’s dome. Visitors entering the building were bathed in the glow of another 128 bulbs, 16 set into each of the eight risers in the interior front steps of the Main Street entrance.
The building itself was an architectural wonder. Designed in the Richardson Romanesque style by the Cleveland, Ohio, firm of Lehman and Schmitt, the dome presented a design challenge because it is, in fact, a cube surmounted by a half-sphere. Think placing a circle over a square and you may appreciate what was involved in its construction.
The interior of the building, and the dome itself, boasted features replicating a 14th-century Tibetan palace. This, mind you, smack dab in the middle of a small sleepy Southern town.
Entering the ground floor from the Short Street side, a visitor would look up some 112 feet to the dome. As originally constructed, the courthouse featured an open “steamship” staircase (think “Titanic”) that provided an unobstructed view of the dome.
Whether visitors appreciated the Tibetan design, those who took a closer look at the dome features (even standing on the then-top third floor, the underside of the dome was another 82 feet up) would see the replication of a palace courtyard, with two balconies spanning across the windows on each of the four sides of the cube. Above the balconies spread the dome and its 128 bulbs, replicating a night sky lit with stars.
The dome ceiling, in fact, is not the underside of the exterior dome passersby observe from the street. There is a space of a dozen or so feet between the ceiling and the roof. In this space are the four clocks on each side of the building, as well as the clock and bell mechanism. The bell is located underneath the cupola, above which had stood an anatomically correct Thoroughbred horse and weather vane. The weathervane was damaged in a fall 2000 windstorm, and is on display in The Lexington History Museum’s “Athens of the West” exhibit.
A massive redesign of the building in 1961 – during which the fourth and fifth floors were added, the staircase removed, and space was provided for six courtrooms where only one had existed – radically changed the interior of the building. Showing absolutely no appreciation for Tibetan architecture, all of those exquisite details were demolished, save for those in the dome, which are preserved in place.
Visitors who had the rare opportunity to visit the dome were immediately taken with its details. Ironically, the dome details were more accessible after the 1961 renovation. Now, with the fifth floor added, visitors could appreciate the design more than ever before, including flowers in panels spanning the four walls, affording evidence of the building interior’s original color palette, otherwise lost to history.
In 1999, as part of the settlement between the city and the Commonwealth of Kentucky over the demolition of the Snyder block where the new courthouses are located, a “minimum of one million dollars” was committed to “convert the current Fayette County Courthouse to the Lexington History Museum with the grounds of the current courthouse to be transformed into a park.”
In fact, only about $800,000 was spent to convert the building into the museum, with the economic constriction following Sept. 11, 2001, given as a cause for limiting the funding. Before his death, former Kentucky governor Edward T. Breathitt was tasked with mounting a capital campaign to renovate the Old Courthouse by then-Mayor Pam Miller. His enthusiasm was less than ebullient – until he saw the dome. “We can do this,” he exclaimed. Unfortunately, his vision and the campaign died with him in Oct. 2004.
Still, visitors to the dome were equally as ebullient. In 2008, LexArts president & CEO Jim Clark observed the dome is “one of the unique interior spaces in Fayette County.” Had he known it existed, he said, he would have included it in the discussions of the Millennium Project that resulted in the Millennium Trail between downtown Lexington and the Kentucky Horse Park.
Now, however, the dome is padlocked and completely inaccessible, due to elevated levels of lead on its surface that have permeated other parts of the building – in fact, as of last month, the entire building is closed to the public indefinitely. Those exquisite painted details that delighted Lexingtonians from 1900 until 1961, and enthralled those blessed few visitors from October 2003 until last month, now threaten the dome’s future, if not that of the Old Courthouse itself.