My Last Kodachrome Slides Ever? Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 2008

In my (messy) archives, I found a box containing Kodachrome slides from November 2008. I think this was the last roll of Kodachrome that I ever exposed. 

Kodak discontinued production of the film in 2009. Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, ran the very last processing anywhere on January 18, 2011. It marked the end of a 75-year era of the famous Kodachrome, a color film that defined and characterized color photography in the mid-20th century.

Here are some examples of this last roll of Kodachrome 64 (K64) from Vicksburg and Edwards, Mississippi. Click any picture to see more detail.

Vicksburg Stores

Former store, 1720 Military Avenue

Closed store, 1326 Magnolia Street (35mm ƒ/2 Summicron lens)

Church

Mount Calvary M B Church, East Avenue, Vicksburg

Corner stone, Mount Calvary MB Church, East Avenue

A recent street view on Google Maps shows that the church has been painted a light color. Note that in 2008, it still had diamond-shaped asbestos roof shingles. 

Cottages

2901 Cherry Street

1200 Harrison Street

Vicksburg had so many of these little early-20th century cottages. One by one, they would be abandoned and, finally, condemned by the city inspector. The word, "Demo" on the Harrison cottage means the inspector has marked it for demolition. This is an example of the deconstruction emptying out of American urban centers.

Speed Street School

This handsome brick school stood at the corner of Speed and Marshall Streets in Vicksburg. Built in 1894, it served as a school until 1940. In 1968, it was divided into low-rent apartments. Two former City employees told me that shootings, fights, drugs, and rapes were continuous trouble when it was used for low-cost housing. I explored inside after the tenants were expelled, and the apartments were horrifying. A Louisiana company demolished the building in 2008 and recycled bricks and timbers. The site is now a grass field.

I took these pictures with my 20mm ƒ/5.6 Russar lens. It was a challenging lens to use well but provided an amazing wide view for settings like this. These are all tripod-mounted.

Edwards

Serious traditional Detroit iron

Edsel sedan - yes, a bit weird

A fellow on the north frontage road at the Edwards exit of Interstate 20 had a serious collection of old Detroit cars. Maybe I could have commissioned him to restore the Edsel for me. Well, maybe not.

I took these photographs on Kodachrome 64 film with my Leica M2 camera and various lenses. Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, developed the film in the last operating Kodak K-Lab processing machine. I scanned the slides with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED film scanner using NikonScan 4.03 software running on Windows 7. 

20mm ƒ/5.6 Russar lens - superb optical performance

This is a late, black version of the Russar lens. It has a M39 thread-mount, so to use it on a Leica M camera, you need a M-LTM adapter. Lomography reintroduced this lens around 2017.

I have posted previous articles that were based on Kodachrome slides. Rhode Island in 1977 is one example. 

From the Archives: 1990s Kodachromes from Vicksburg, Mississippi

Vicksburg, Mississippi, had so much interesting photographic material. I am glad I explored when Kodak's famous Kodachrome film was still available and could be processed by laboratories equipped to handle the special chemicals and techniques. I used Kodachrome until near its final end in the early 2000s. It is gone forever and will not be revived, despite the requests from old-timers. Here are some samples from the 1990s.

Fairground Street Bridge from top of an oil tank 

Rear stairs on Grove Street house pre-renovation (20mm ƒ/5.6 Russar lens)

Deconstruction, 807 Main Street

Chevrolet, Grove Street

Vicksburg depot and tracks used by Vicksburg Southern Railroad (VSOR)

View east to Mulberry Street from depot 2nd floor

I looked into the former depot (now housing the Old Depot Museum) and saw some youngsters. They said they rented an apartment on the second floor. They generously let me take some photographs from their balcony.

Lower Grove Street

Discount Barn, Levee Street

Former McKay Motors on Washington Street (150mm ƒ/4 Super-Takumar lens)

Cottages, 505 and 507 Fairground Street (200mm ƒ/4 Leitz Telyt-V lens)

Pearl Street view north (50mm)

This ends a short look back in time. I have hundreds of more Kodachrome slides of Vicksburg. Will I ever have time to scan them? 

From the Archives: Good Stuff in Pass Manchac, Louisiana, 1997

Ai Statement 2026:

None of the photographs you will ever see here on Urban Decay are generated by or modified by Artificial Intelligence (Ai). They are the genuine image recorded somewhere on earth at some time. I clean lint and scratches manually on some film pictures using the heal tool in Photoshop CS5 and CS6, but the rest of the photographs are as recorded on film. Occasional digital photos are from cameras old enough to not have any embedded Ai software.. 

Dear Readers, you can trust that what you see is real (or was if the site has been demolished).

---

Pass Manchac

Pass Manchac is the waterway (pass) between Lakes Ponchartrain and Mauripas in southern Louisiana. Many drivers zip over the pass on Interstate 55 without paying much attention. But locals in the know pull off into the little community of Manchac to eat at the famous Middendorf's restaurant. It has been in business since 1934, surviving hurricanes, floods, the Great Depression, and the interstate highway system. 

The rest of the unincorporated community consists of some interesting little stores and swamp tour companies.

Middendorf's serves the best fried flounder (whole fish with head) I have eaten anywhere. It oozes over the boundaries of a dinner plate. The catfish is also remarkably good.

Reno's Seafood: fresh shrimp, crabs, crawfish, and beer. I wish I had tried the boudin.

Local sign-making at its best. I miss south Louisiana. It is culturally and gastronomically so interesting.

I took most of these photographs in 1997 on Kodachrome 25 film with my Leica M3 camera and the 35mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron-RF lens. This was the spectacular 8-element model, which is now a coveted collectors item. The RF means this version was equipped with goggles to adjust the view in the viewfinder of the Leica M3 camera. Leica also sold a version without the goggles for their M2 and M4 cameras, which had a different viewfinder. 

I scanned the slides with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 film scanner.

Leica M3 camera with 35mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron-RF lens

From the Archives: July 4, 1944, celebrations, Post Island, Massachusetts

The family beach cottage (house), Post Island, Quincy, Massachusetts, USA

My dad spent part of World War II in Puerto Rico working for the US Navy. He was a civilian engineer, and when the project ended, he returned home to Boston. His sister and brother-in-law owned a cottage (house) on the shore at Post Island, a section of the Hough's Neck Peninsula that projects out into Massachusetts Bay. He joined them and the other beach residents for old-fashioned 4th of July celebrations.

Uncle Cliff and the horseshoes

The Penny search in the sand

Aunt Mary at the potato race

Watermelon consumption contest

Costume contest

Tennis champions with non-tennis shoes

Enjoying a short one in a genuine woody station wagon

Dianne enjoying a mackerel

Dulcie, Aunt Mary, and Joe on the beach

These Kodachromes record a world that looks so ordinary, so Americana. Children are enjoying a holiday at the beach. The gents are building an addition to a house. Girls are playing tennis. The very innocence of these scenes is the point. 

War was waging on three continents. Terrific battles were being waged on the Pacific Islands, in France and China, and on the horrifying Eastern Front. Civilians in China and Russia were starving. Most families in these pictures had a relative or neighbor overseas or on the oceans. 

But in Massachusetts on this sunny July day, life looked so normal. There was no destruction, hunger, or fear. The houses were neat and intact. The lights were on. By 1944, civilians could buy butter, sugar, coffee, and gasoline, although the latter may have still been rationed. The miseries of war seemed far away.

In total contrast, in 1944, my mother was a child in Berlin. Life there was much more brutal. Hunger and the secret police were constant threats.

My dad was able to afford and buy 35mm Kodachrome film and use it for family snapshots. Possibly he had bought the rolls at the navy post exchange on Puerto Rico before he returned to the mainland, but regardless, he felt secure enough in its availability to use it for casual photographs. It underscores the amazing capability of our industrial output. 

Update: 1946 on Post Island

My dad took these photographs on the original 35mm Kodachrome film. I think the film speed was Weston 8 or approximately ASA 10. I am not sure if he used an electronic light meter then. The camera might have been his Perfex, made by the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago, Illinois, with unknown 50mm lens. I scanned these slides on my Nikon CoolScan 5000 film scanner, operated by NikonScan software on a Windows 7 computer.

From the Space Needle in 1995 (Seattle, Washington) (Sea 02)

Business took me to western Washington in 1995. A coworker and I looked at the beach at Ocean Shores, which faces the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of Grays Harbor. Southward sediment transport had built a wide beach against the north jetty. Developers were building condominiums on the beach. Was this a vulnerable location? Were there feasible escape routes if sirens warned of a tsunami? What would happen to the beach if the sediment transport shifted to moving north? 

After the field trip, we had a few days to spend in Seattle. My coworker had never been to the city and was intrigued by the Space Needle. A fellow we met under the Needle generously offered us two free tickets for the elevator. It was a gorgeous sunny day, so, of course we took the lift to the viewing balcony.

Room with a view: Space Needle from the Mediterranean Inn (Fuji digital photograph taken with a Jupiter-8 lens)

2004 panorama of South Lake Union district from Eastlake Avenue E (Hasselblad XPan camera)

First, the general setting. This is a 2004 panoramic photograph of Queen Anne (the hill to the right), South Lake Union, Uptown, and Belltown districts (taken with a Hasselblad X-Pan camera). The Needle is the iconic tower built for the 1962 World's Fair. In the 1970s, when I was a student here, this area south of Lake Union was a commercial district of warehouses and manufacturing. By the early 2000s, it was transforming into condos, clubs, museums, and modern businesses. In the photograph above, the red building in the foreground is part of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, one of the foremost cancer research institutes in the world. Click the picture to enlarge the scene and see the snowy Olympic Mountains in the distance.

Port of Seattle, view south from Space Needle

Now, let's ascend to the viewing balcony on the Space Needle and look south. Seattle is a high value seaport. It is a spectacular natural harbor because it is ice-free, deep, and sheltered from Pacific Ocean storms. In the photograph above, you can see the container terminal in the distance with a freighter in the roadstead. A ferry boat is on its way to Bremerton. Many Seattleites commute daily via the ferries. Seattle is also a major cruise terminal, but I do not see any cruise ships in this scene. 

To the left, you can see two features that are now, thankfully, gone. 

The big white dome is the infamous Kingdome. I recall some of the controversy during construction in the 1972-1973 period. It was sited in the Industrial District south of Pioneer Square. African-American businesses were displaced (i.e., forced out at low real estate values). Construction was plagued with errors, poor design, and a contractor who was unable to complete the work. The building suffered water problems. Parts of the roof collapsed in 1994. Finally, controlled implosion in March of 2000 brought down the nasty structure. A century-old African-American community had been replaced by a boondoggle that lasted 27 years. King County taxpayers had to pay for the bonds for another 15 years. Hmmm, is it possible some corruption was involved?

Alaskan Way Viaduct before demolition (from Wikimedia, based on Open Street Maps)

To the right of The Kingdome is the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a double-decked freeway that carried State Route 99 along the waterfront. The city built the viaduct in three phases between 1949 and 1953. It cut off the city from the waterfront, similar to the way the Southeast Expressway in Boston became a barrier between Boston, the North End, and the waterfront. The web site, The Historic Pacific Highway in Washington, has more information about the viaduct. 

Engineers knew that the viaduct was vulerable to earthquakes. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Oakland, California, destroyed the similar Cypress Street Viaduct, causing 42 deaths.  The 2001 Nisqually earthquake in Seattle damaged the viaduct and its supporting Alaskan Way Seawall. The steel flanges, girders, and bolts that I saw in 2004 were attempts to shore up the structure of the viaduct.  

My coworkers at the Corps of Engineers were well aware of the viaduct's earthquake vulnerability. They told me which lanes to use in case the upper structure collapsed. By carefully driving between the concrete support rows, my car would be only partly squashed by the descending concrete roadway. I was so reassured....

After long and heated debate, King County, the city, and the Port of Seattle decided to bore a tunnel under the route of the viaduct and totally remove the concrete eyesore. You know the story: the tunnel cost vastly more than originally predicted and numerous technical issues slowed construction, but it finally opened to traffic in February of 2019. Demolishing and crunching up the viaduct took only a year. The city now has access to the waterfront without the concrete eyesore. 

On recent trips to Seattle, I have driven Route 99 instead of fight the traffic on I-5. The tunnel appears to flow well while I-5 is bumper-to-bumper. Cameras automatically tag your car to identify where to send a bill for the toll. 

Lake Union with the University of Washington Campus in the distance

Turn to the northeast and look at the body of water. Lake Union is a freshwater lake in the center of Seattle. The Fremont Cut (to the left) lets boats reach Puget Sound via the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. The Montlake Cut, beyond the I-5 bridge in the distance, gives access to Lake Washington. Museums, shipyards, houseboats, and seaplane companies line the shore of Lake Union. "Sleepless in Seattle" takes place in one of these houseboats. The Vashon Glacier excavated the lake about 12,000 years ago and sculpted most of the contemporary geomorphology in the Puget lowlands.

Lake Union view south

This is Lake Union from the Gas Works Park, the site of a former coal gasification plant from the early 20th century. The Gas Works operated from 1873 to 1956, when natural gas from Canada supplanted the nasty and toxic gas plant. A landscape architect and University of Washington professor, Richard Haag, designed a plan to convert the site into a park, retaining some of the steel towers and tubes.

This ends our much too quick overview of Seattle. I want to look at my 1970s archives and see if there are more photographs from downtown.

By the way, if you want to see a really bad Elvis movie that features the Space Needle, watch "It Happened at the World's Fair." As TCM described it, "The Monorail and Space Needle are prominent as Mike (Elvis Presley) and friend Sue-Lin (Vicky Tiu) take in the sights". It is an utterly absurd plot, but Elvis sings. What more could you want in a movie?

This was article Sea 02