, Drawing Downtown
Artist Gives City New Perspective
The city of Lexington has utilized the skills of local artist Merryn Williams to create a book of the facades of all of the buildings in downtown Lexington, which will serve as a resource for the city in a variety of ways.
The project came about during the Economic Development Authority’s development of its fire suppression system incentive program. The EDA was able to get a list of the people who owned property downtown, but EDA Chair Camille Miller felt they needed some more information to properly develop the program.
“It was good for notifying people about the sprinkler program, but it didn’t tell us some of the things we needed to know, like how many apartments do we have downtown and if they already have fire suppression systems,” she said. She also wanted the information to have a “visual aid” to go along with it to help provide an easy guide of the downtown buildings.
THIS DRAWING, depicting the southern side of the 100 block of West Washington Street, is one of several detailed renderings of the buildings that line the streets of Lexington’s historic downtown done by local artist Merryn Williams. The drawings were commissioned by the city for a book to be utilized by the city for a variety of purposes. (image courtesy of Merryn Williams Designs)
“Some people can read a spreadsheet at a glance,” she said. “Others need a little more assistance.”
Miller and the EDA were put in touch with Williams through Rebecca Logan, who at the time was the executive director of Main Street Lexington, where Williams also works. Williams was officially commissioned to do the drawings of the downtown buildings in April 2025 and began working on them in May. She finished drawing all of the buildings by September and had the completed book put together and presented to the EDA in October.
The process of capturing all of the buildings downtown, she told The News-Gazette in a recent interview, took longer than she had anticipated when she began the work. Part of the reason is that she did the drawings by hand, so she would take breaks during the process, working off-andon on it over the course of several months.
Rather than rely on other images of the buildings downtown for reference, Williams took her own photos of each building, photographing them straight-on from the opposite side of the street and zooming in to capture as much detail as she could of the buildings.
“I would take my dog on a walk and focus on a block,” she said. “I would typically work a block at a time, and I would have [the photos] up on my computer as big as I could get them. Those would be my references, and I would line them up.”
Williams started with the Gin Hotel building, since it’s the tallest building downtown and one of the more detailed. Completing that drawing took six hours of work, but drawing other buildings took less time. Drawing all of the buildings on both sides of East Nelson Street between Main and Randolph streets, she said, took the same amount of work hours as the hotel because “the buildings are smaller and they kind of stuck together.”
A lot of the buildings in downtown Lexington, she noted, are “extremely ornate,” and she said she found capturing the details of the facades was both “challenging” and “extremely fun.” Now that she’s drawn them, she says she notices the details about the buildings that she “didn’t pick up on before.”
The intricate details weren’t Williams’ biggest challenge in the course of completing the book. That honor, she said, belongs to the number of buildings that are in downtown Lexington.
“You think about downtown Lexington as being this little, compact downtown historic district,” she said, “but then when you start to look at all of the streets and [at] each side of the street, it just felt like it kept expanding.”
In addition to the facades of the individual buildings, she also captured the slope of the streets, creating an accurate representation of each street, not just in detail but in elevation.
The completed book starts with the buildings on North Main Street and works south through downtown. Beneath each building is information about it, including the name (if it has one) and the year it was built. The book also lists the number of units on the street level and how many residential and/or commercial units are in the upper levels.
While drawings like these aren’t her normal artistic fare – Williams primarily does watercolor commissions – she has a degree in interior design from Virginia Tech, so doing drawings like the ones for the book are well within her wheelhouse. The deviation from her normal art style was something that Williams said she enjoyed about the experience.
“A lot of my stuff is more playful and colorful, so this was a nice change of pace, to be very clear and formal and uniform,” she said. “I think it was good for my brain to switch it up.”
Miller said that the EDA’s primary use for the book will be in promoting the new fire suppression system program, and that the city will have the book to use for other projects as well. Williams’ drawings, she said, “are detailed and intricate, but they weren’t cluttered. I can see how we could use it in many different ways.”
Part of the agreement with the city was that, while the city would have use of the book, Williams would retain the rights to her drawings, meaning that she is able to sell them independently of their use for the city. She has put together a print containing all of the buildings and street fronts that she drew for the book, which can be purchased at Downtown Books on Main Street, or through Williams’ website, merrynwilliamsdesigns. com. A portion of each sale will be donated to the Main Street Lexington Design Committee.
