Clarke & Loomis and the Levy Brothers Building
Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Clarke & Loomis Architects/ Levy Brothers Building. Clarke & Loomis Architects- Charles Julian Clarke (1836-1908) of Frankfort, Ky. & Arthur Loomis (1858-1935) of Jeffersonville, In. collaborated from 1876 on many Louisville landmarks: Carter Dry Goods, Conrad-Caldwell House, Old Medical School. Clarke died while serving as 1st pres. of Ky. Chapter- American Institute of Architects & Loomis fulfilled his term. Loomis designed Speed Art Museum, 1925. (Reverse) Levy Brothers Building- Designed by Clarke & Loomis in Richardsonian Romanesque style, the Levy Building opened in 1893. It originally housed Levy Brothers Clothing Store, which closed in 1979. Because the building was outlined with electric lights, the phrase “lit up like Levy’s” became a popular expression describing bright, nighttime illumination.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
From 1876, architects Charles Julian Clarke and Arthur Loomis designed many of Louisville's most memorable buildings, from the Conrad-Caldwell House to the Speed Art Museum. Their Levy Brothers Building, opened in 1893 in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style, housed a beloved clothing store for nearly a century. Outlined in electric lights at night, the store gave the city its own phrase for brilliance—"lit up like Levy's."
Why it matters
The partnership's work captures the Gilded Age confidence of a growing American city, and the electrified Levy Building marks the moment when new technology turned commerce into public spectacle.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Louisville that Charles Julian Clarke and Arthur Loomis built into was a Gilded Age city in full stride. The decades after the Civil War poured new wealth into American commerce, and a river city like Louisville translated that wealth into architecture: department stores, mansions, medical schools, and banks, each trying to look more permanent and more impressive than the last.
It was also an age intoxicated by the muscular new style the architect H. H. Richardson had made famous, the Richardsonian Romanesque, with its rough-cut stone, deep round arches, and sense of massive solidity. A building in that manner did not whisper prosperity; it planted its feet and declared it.
And it was the dawn of the electric age. Louisville had hosted the great Southern Exposition of the 1880s, where crowds marveled at one of the largest displays of incandescent lighting yet assembled. To people who had grown up by lamplight, a building outlined in electric bulbs was not mere decoration. It was the future, switched on.
People & events
Clarke, born in Frankfort in 1836, and Loomis, born across the river in Jeffersonville in 1858, began collaborating in 1876, a partnership bridging a generation. Over the decades their names attached to many of Louisville's landmarks, from the ornate Conrad-Caldwell House in the city's grand Old Louisville district to the Carter Dry Goods building and the Old Medical School. Theirs was the portfolio of architects entrusted with a city's self-image.
Their standing in the profession was formal as well as artistic. Clarke became the first president of the Kentucky chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the national body of the profession, and when he died in 1908, Loomis stepped in to finish his term, a quiet act of partnership extending even past the grave. Loomis carried the practice forward, and in 1925 designed the Speed Art Museum, a capstone bridging the Gilded Age into the twentieth century.
But the building that gave the city a phrase was the Levy Brothers Building, opened in 1893 in full Richardsonian Romanesque dress. It housed the Levy Brothers clothing store, a downtown fixture that endured until 1979. What people remembered, though, was the light. The store was outlined in electric bulbs, and in an age when that was a genuine spectacle, Louisvillians coined their own superlative for brilliance: lit up like Levy's.
Its place in the American story
The story of Clarke and Loomis is the story of how a generation of American cities grew into themselves. In the decades after the Civil War, the architect became a defining civic figure, the professional who gave a booming town its permanent face, and the founding of state AIA chapters marked that profession coming of age across the country.
The Levy Brothers Building captures a second, larger national turn: the moment electricity stopped being an experiment and became an experience. When a store wrapped itself in light, it was doing something new in American commerce, turning a building into an advertisement and nighttime itself into a stage. The great illuminated expositions of the era taught Americans to associate electric light with progress, and merchants were quick to borrow that glow.
That a city invented a saying for the sight tells you how deep the impression ran. Lit up like Levy's is a small piece of folk language preserving a genuine wonder, the first time ordinary people saw the night made bright on purpose.
If you visit
Approach on foot and let the style announce itself. Richardsonian Romanesque rewards a slow eye: run your gaze over the heavy, rusticated stone and the broad round arches, and notice how the building seems to carry real weight, as if it were quarried rather than built. This was architecture meant to feel eternal.
Then try the harder act of imagination the marker invites. Picture the facade at night, more than a century ago, traced in rows of electric bulbs against a dark downtown, a sight startling enough to enter the local vocabulary. The daylight building is impressive; the remembered nighttime one is the reason you came.
It makes a fine anchor for a walking tour of Louisville's Gilded Age downtown, where the work of these two architects and their contemporaries still lines the streets. Keep their names in mind as you go, because once you start noticing Clarke and Loomis buildings, you will find their confident stamp across the city.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Charles Julian Clarke
- · Arthur Loomis
Themes & tags
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