trade fueled Louisville's early growth following its settlement in 1779, West Main Street became the first street established by residents. Because of its close proximity to Main Street and the Ohio River, the intersection of Ninth and Main Streets came to serve important commercial purposes. A tobacco warehouse built at the northeast corner of the intersection began operating in the 1850s. The firm of Meguiar, Harris & Co. managed the so-called 9th Street Tobacco Warehouse until the 1890s. On March 27, 1890, a tornado measuring F4 on the Fujita scale visited Louisville, carving a path from the Parkland neighborhood to Crescent Hill. Labeled "the whirling tiger of the air" by The Courier-Journal, the tornado killed an estimated 76 to 120 people and destroyed 766 buildings, one of which was the 9th Street Tobacco Warehouse. A rapid reconstruction effort led to the building of more cast-iron façades along West Main between Sixth and Ninth Streets — in all, what would amount to the second largest number of cast-iron façades in the country behind SoHo in New York. A small article published in the March 23, 1897 issue of The Courier-Journal announced that John Doerhoefer, the president of National Tobacco Works, would build “four handsome business houses at Ninth and Main Streets” on the site of the old 9th Street Tobacco Warehouse. Architecture Mr. Doerhoefer hired D. X. Murphy and Bros., the architectural firm that two years earlier had designed the iconic Twin Spires atop the grandstand at Churchill Downs, to draw the plans. It was to be made of brick, stone, and iron with a tower at the corner. Established in 1898 and built of cast iron and yellow-buff brick, the Doerhoefer Building was actually built as a complex of four adjoining buildings with common walls and a single façade. The structure spans four typical Main Street fronts (827 – 833) before it rounds the corner of Ninth Street with an oriel topped with a cornice roof. Each façade is separated by pilasters with simple ornamentation. Machine-made festoons decorate the horizontal bandcourse which divides each major section between the second and third floors. Windows on the fourth floor are separated by brick pilasters with stone capitals, which continue into arches of radiating bricks with some trim. Much of the original stone ornamentation has gone missing. Ox Breeches In 1900, Ox Breeches Manufacturing Company began operating a garment factory in the Doerhoefer