By James Bruggers
The Courier-Journal

Louisville's waterfront district has won the brownfields equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar.

Claiming the 2002 Phoenix Award Grand Prize for Excellence, the district edged out finalists from Chicago, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and six other communities.

The Phoenix Awards group is run out of Pennsylvania by a committee with representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, various state agencies and private business.

The term "brownfields" applies to older and often abandoned industrial sites - usually in urban areas - where redevelopment is complicated by the presence of contaminants.

The Louisville Waterfront Development Corp. board of directors received the award in December.

Once the site of industrial urban blight, much of the area along the Ohio River downtown has been transformed into Waterfront Park. The award also includes development of nearby Louisville Slugger Field.

The organization praised the cleanup and remediation, saying the project had brought new life to the area, including an estimated 1.3 million people a year to Waterfront Park and another 700,000 people a year to the baseball stadium.

The award and the recognition it brings to Louisville "makes a statement to the community . . . that it can pull together and turn (an area) around," said David Karem, president of the waterfront corporation.

The Phoenix Award is one of many that the project has garnered, Mr. Karem said, but is among the two most significant. The other was in 2001 from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

A second phase of Waterfront Park is under construction. Work on a planned cafe, amphitheater, boat docks and playground along the river are moving ahead, said Mike Kimmel, the waterfront corporation's assistant director.

Timing for a third phase, near the Big Four Bridge, remains uncertain.