The Buzz

The proposed Farmers Market development plan for Lexington’s Cheapside Park would give John C. Breckinridge a new view of the world, so to speak.

A statue of Breckinridge, who served as vice president and U.S. senator before joining the Confederacy during the Civil War, has stood along Cheapside for about a century.

The statue faces the old Fayette County Courthouse, which is now a museum, because Breckinridge was a lawyer and “that’s where he conducted business,” said Clete Benken, a principal in Covington consulting firm KKG Studios.

The KKG plan calls for Breckinridge to be moved 40 or 50 feet to the Main Street end of the park. The statue also would be turned to face Main “to let people see who he is.”

Would it be hard to move the Breckinridge statue?

Not really, Benken says, although engineers haven’t evaluated the job yet.

A fountain in Cincinnati that probably weighs 20 times more than the Breckinridge statue “was picked up and moved twice in the last five years,” he said.

And the cost?

That’s not clear yet, either.

“It’s probably a significant number, but not an outrageous number,” Benken said.

Besides, history buffs might say that giving Breckinridge a new view of Lexington is priceless.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Historic preservation, People, Urban redevelopment. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.