What was Shipp Street, and Whatever Happened to it?
There was a time when the University of Louisville's Belknap Campus gave its address as "Third and Shipp, Louisville 8, Ky." According to some accounts, Shipp Street was named for Ewall Shipp, whose heirs sold the current Belknap site to Louisville in 1850. From 1925, when U of L moved its main campus to the present location, until it was displaced by campus construction in more recent years, Shipp Street effectively formed the northern border of the campus. It ran diagonally from Brook and Warnock streets, on the southeast, past the Confederate Monument at Third Street, on the northwest. Another section ended at Seventh Street. Streetcars maneuvered down Shipp carrying U of L students to class via the loop encircling the Loop Hole Restaurant where the west wing of the Life Sciences Building now stands, and baseball fans to Parkway Field via a second loop near the present Chemistry Building. Although Robbins Hall, given to the university in 1944, was the first U of L property across Shipp Street, for all practical purposes the northward march of campus buildings began with the construction of Stevenson Hall in the late 1950s, forcing students to dodge cars on Shipp to get to class. In 1971 the last portion of the Belknap Campus section of Shipp Street was renamed Intramural Place, as construction on the Humanities Building began.
Campus entrance, Shipp St. and 1st
An attractive low stone wall bordered Shipp Street on the south. The removal of most of the wall in the early 1970s was met first with resistance, then sadness, from many people who remembered it as a popular resting and meeting place. (So popular was it as a gathering place for student that it once captured the concern of the U of L Women's League. In 1934 that group, "to aid the university in preservation of the dignity of co-eds," urged that the young ladies not be allowed to smoke, sit on the Shipp Street wall, or lounge on the grass.) Two U of L biology professors called it "a tangible reminder and physical link between the University Belknap Campus and Old Louisville, and the older generations of Louisvillians who established the University."
The small section of the Shipp Street wall running just north of the Speed Museum and Ekstrom Library is the only portion of the wall near its original location. Some of the stones from the dismantled portion of the wall have been used at various places on the Health Sciences and Belknap campuses, most notably the enclosure of the north end of Parrish Court between Gottschalk and Gardiner halls.
Adapted from Inside U of L, April 1982, and Cox and Morison, The University of Louisville (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, c2000), pp. 133-134.
