1 Not long ago I made a keynote speech at a conference in Louisville, Kentucky about sustainability (Throgmorton, 2004a). In brief, I argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between city making and story telling. To make the Louisville region more sustainable, the people of that city would have to make narrative and physical space for diverse storytellers. Their shared urban narratives would need to be locally grounded and include black Louisvillians. From this point of view, the city's new Muhammad Ali Center could act as a powerful trope in persuasive stories about making Louisville a more sustainable place.