The district includes 401 resources (buildings, structures, objects, sites) on 126 acres (51 ha).[2] It is roughly bounded by East and West 2nd St., Logan St., the Kentucky River, High St., and Mero St.[1][2]
The district was created to merge and expand upon previously listed historic resources. It includes all of:
It also includes portions of Second Street and Shelby Street within the South Frankfort Neighborhood Historic District, NRHP-listed in 1982, which contains the current Kentucky State Capitol, Governor's Mansion, and surrounding residential area. It additionally includes and recognizes properties, in and outside of the previously listed areas, of later periods of significance than previously recognized.
The district thus created constitutes a "well-defined evolutionary district which portrays development in Frankfort from the 1790s into the 1960s."[2]
The district was deemed significant "on a statewide basis as a strong concentration of primarily residential and commercial historic resources built largely on a late-eighteenth-century grid of streets encompassing historic state governmental buildings, representative of the cultural patterns of governance, commerce, and community planning, and containing the homes of a series of individuals of transcendent importance to the locale, state, and nation."[2]
