Vicksburg with Color Film 2017 (test of a Hasselblad)

Clay Street, Vicksburg (also known as the ugliest street in America), 150mm Sonnar lens.

My friend generously loaned me his Hasselblad camera and gave me some Fuji NHG400 color film to try. The Hasselblad is a 6×6 film camera, like my older Rolleiflex, but instead has a modular design. The reflex mirror is in a rectangular box. A lens mounts on one side, a film-holder on the opposite, and a viewfinder on top. You can switch and swap components as needed, and all these parts click together with remarkable tolerances (similar to how 50-year-old Leica lenses work perfectly on a new body).

Hasselblad 501CM, A12 film back, and Zeiss 80mm f/2.8 CB lens (all 1999 production).

Kansas City Southern railroad line from the Confederate Avenue bridge, Vicksburg Military Park, 150mm lens.

The Hasselblad has a big advantage over the Rolleiflex: you can change lenses. My friend's 150mm Sonnar lens, although about 40 years old, has beautiful color fidelity. It gave a field of view approximately equivalent to an 80 mm lens in 35mm terms.

501 Fairground Street, 150mm lens.

503 Fairground Street.

The five matching houses on Fairground street are typical 1920s cottages. They are wider than shotgun houses but similarly intended as inexpensive housing for urban working families. I have photographed them before many times.

Fairground Street bridge, 150mm lens (flare is from a  light leak in the film back).

The Fairground street bridge is now closed to car or foot traffic and is deteriorating. One span was built by the Keystone Bridge Company and was erected here in 1895. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

KCS railroad cut from Washington Street, 150mm lens.

Gent with his bicycle, 150mm lens.

I often like to photograph the Kansas City Southern railroad line where it passes under Washington Street and runs through a deep valley between Belmont and Pine Streets. The gent on the bicycle was coming down the sidewalk and we chatted. He graciously let me take his portrait.

Tri-State Tire, 2209 Washington Street, Vicksburg.

This building with its Spanish motif was once an ice cream shop but has been a tire store since the 1970s.

Stairs on the east side of the unused Mercy Hospital, Grove Street, 80mm Planar lens.

The former Mercy Hospital is closed and locked, but must have a lot of photographic potential. Some background on the hospital is in this Preservation Mississippi post.

2314 Grove Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 80mm lens. (Update Dec. 2019: the house is empty but still standing)

This is a typical early 20th century cottage. This was once been a duplex, but one door has been removed.

Thank you, Bob, for letting me use your camera and lenses. But now that I have sampled a Hasselblad, I want to buy one (Hmmm, an element of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) at play here.....).

Vicksburg from the Archives, 1993-1994, Ektar 25 film

I recently had some old Kodak Ektar 25 film negatives scanned that I exposed in 1993 and 1994. Even with the passage of only 20 years, you can see changes in slow-moving Vicksburg.

Let's take a walk on Washington street and head south. This is the Vicksburg Cafe at 1625 Washington Street, formerly at the corner of Washington and South Madison. I do not remember when the building was torn down. And now I realize why the Warren County library, seen to the left, did not have an entrance on the south side. The architect likely felt there was not enough space for a driveway and entry stairs. But now this is an empty lot, and this side would be a much more suitable entry area for the library than its inadequate and awkward parking lot on Walnut Street. And the library's entrance on the north side of the building is totally useless.

F&G Beverages at 1701 Washington Street has thrived and grown. The drive-through on the left is gone now. Whenever I bicycle by, the store has customers. I better not write what I think of this demonstration of small-town prosperity.

Dollar General has also thrived, but this building at 1713 is gone.

This is the view north from the corner of Washington and Bridge Streets. The former Mississippi Hardware company is in the distance to the left. In World War II, the build housed a fabric and sewing manufacturer.

Nick's Auto Parts, in the old brick corner store (1733 Washington Street), is closed.

The next building south was the Vicksburg Seed store. I recall that several additions or porches on the side were torn down over the years.

This view looking north is over the railroad viaduct.

If you turned east and walked up Belmont Street, from some of the parking lots on the north side, you could look north over the railroad cut. There were once a number of houses and gardens (mini-farms) on the slope. Most are gone now. Some of the shotgun shacks were the classic Vicksburg type where the entrance was level with the road but the back projected out over the slope, supported by wood posts. A retired city engineer told me that these post houses cannot be rebuilt or permitted if they collapse. But they were common in the early 20th century as a way to accommodate the area's complicated topography.

I took these photographs with a FujiFilm GW690II medium-format camera with 90mm ƒ/3.5 Fujinon lens using Kodak Ektar 25 film. This was a fine-grain, contrasty emulsion, and was a bit hard to use but spectacular if you wanted fine detail.

Rest in Peace: Remnants of the "Sprague", Vicksburg, Mississippi

The towboat "Sprague," known as the "Big Mama," was the most powerful and high-capacity sternwheel river boat to ply the Mississippi River. A Mississippi vessel is known as a tow, but really it serves as a pusher, where the powered unit pushes a series of barges up- or down-river. The photograph above, from Mississippi Department of Archives and History, shows the massive stern paddle wheel that would push the entire tow.

This is a 1946 photograph from the Standard Oil (NJ) Collection, Photographic Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville.

Southern View wrote about the Big Mama. Some statistics from Wikipedia:

Type:	Towboat
Length:	276 ft (84 m)
Beam:	61 ft (19 m)
Draft:	7.4 ft (2.3 m)
Installed power:	2,079 horsepower (1,550 kW)
Propulsion:	coal-fired steam

The "Sprague" was in operation from 1902 to 1948. After it was decommissioned, it served as a museum on the Vicksburg waterfront. For decades, the Mississippi River melodrama, "Gold in the Hills" was performed onboard. The boat burned at dock on 15 April 1974 under the usual mysterious circumstances. There were plans to restore part of it, but they never came to fruition. Because it was a hazard to navigation on the Yazoo Canal, the hulk was dynamited. Some of the metal remains lay in the dirt and woods just west of North Washington Street for decades. Some bollards or capstans were moved to the Catfish Row playground on Levee street. A few more parts and and the rudder are in the parking lot next to the Klondike restaurant on North Washington Street.

But the largest metal bits are still in the thickets next to the Yazoo Canal. It is easy to reach the site, and there are no "no trespassing" signs. These two photographs show stacks and some unknown tubing.

 Some of the pipe joints have crumbling asbestos.

The boilers must have been quite impressive when intact. Note the bee holes in the packed mud.

Most of these parts are hard to see in summer, when the vines and poison ivy engulf everything. I don't understand why they have not been taken to Catfish Row, where tourists could see how mighty the "Sprague" was once.

These digital images are from a Fujifilm X-E1 digital camera with Fuji 18mm f/2 lens. I processed the RAW files with DxO Filmpack 5 with the Kodak Tri-X or Agra Scala film emulations. They still do not look like real black and white film photographs, so next time I'll return with film.

For more historical photographs and scans of one of the programs, please click this link.

Vicksburg's Lost Masonic Temple

During the early 20th century, most American cities of any size or commercial prominence had a Masonic Temple or Lodge. Often it was a well-built building in the commercial area, typically dating from the late-1800s or early 1900s. The Masons must have been fabulously wealthy to be able to buy land and erect substantial brick buildings in major cities. I sometimes wondered if Vicksburg had a lodge, and by pure chance, found some photographs in the Library of Congress' holdings.

This rather severe three-floor building is the former Masonic Temple, at the corner of Grove and Washington Streets. The view is looking uphill to the east along Grove Street. This building and the small shops to the left were razed sometime before 1985, and the grassy lot now serves the weekly farmers' market. The present Highway 61 Coffeehouse and Attic Gallery are just off the frame to the right, where the cars are pointing. The metadata from Library of Congress does not provide a specific date other than post-1933. My guess from the cars is mid-1970s.

This is the view of the rear. The windows are broken out, so it must have been abandoned at the time the photograph was taken. My friend from Mississippi Department of Archives and History checked and found an undated article from the Vicksburg Sunday Post, apparently from the 1970s with a photo of the building and a caption noting that it had recently "been taken by Urban Renewal" and demolished. The article was mostly about the history of the lodge and the contents of  in its cornerstone. The urban renewal craze of the late-1970s demolished many historic buildings in Vicksburg.

This is a photograph from a 1931 paper (James, P.E. 1931. Vicksburg: A Study in Urban Geography, Geographical Review, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), pp. 234-243). The Temple is the building with a light roof in the middle left. Note the gas tank in the middle of the photograph near the river.

This is postcard 90864-01-postcard_View North from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The temple is the tall building in the right center. The Yazoo Canal is in flood, and I wonder if this was taken during the 1927 flood?

This is the grassy field where the buildings once stood. They were already gone when I moved to town in 1985. The limestone block wall in the center may be Civil-War era. The building on the right received a major renovation and conversion into a BBQ restaurant. It operated for only a few months (maybe a couple of years?), and the building is for sale.

The Reverend Dennis painted the Masonic symbol in several places on Margaret's Gro on North Washington Street. He spent two decades decorating the old grocery store as a "Bible Temple to God." The Reverend passed away a few years ago, and his Temple is crumbling away.

If anyone can add any information about the Vicksburg Masonic Temple, please add to the comments. Based on a quick search, I found two present lodges. I do not know how active they are.
1. Masonic Temple, W.G. Paxton Lodge #559; and
2. William H. Stevens Lodge #121, F&AM Masonic Lodge in Vicksburg, MS.

Lost Houses: Lower Main Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Dear Readers, happy and prosperous 2015 to you all.

Main Street is one of Vicksburg's historic streets, and the waterfront and hill near the Yazoo Canal (formerly the main stem of the Mississippi River) is one of the earliest areas to be settled in the 1800s. Sadly, we have lost many of the old houses from this district over the years.

I recall that in the 1980s and early 1990s, the square building at the corner of Main and Washington Streets was a local corner grocery store. Unfortunately, I never photographed the interior.

But the good news is that Rusty's Riverfront Grill now occupies the site (901 Washington Street). This is a success story - an old building with a new life. It has been renovated and expanded.

The next building uphill is a garage at 714 Main Street.

716 Main was an old-fashioned house that had been empty for some time and, as of mid-2014, was being deconstructed. In the second picture, you can see right through the left wall.
June 2015 update: this building has been demolished.

718 Main is in good condition and was occupied in late 2014.

No. 722 is a duplex with plaster or concrete siding made to look like limestone. The brick building in the left distance is the Jackson Street Community Center. That was the former site of a YMCA (click the link).

On the next block east (uphill), the shotgun shacks at nos. 802 and 804 were demolished years ago. This photograph (a Kodachrome slide) is from 2000.

Across the street, at 807 Main, there was once a big 2-story building. I did not pay much attention until I saw the demolition crew at work in February of 1998. These photographs were also Kodachrome slides taken with a Leica camera and 35mm Summicron lens.

At 808, the building had the concrete (or plaster?) siding shaped to look like limestone blocks.

So it goes; slowly but surely, more structures are being removed than built. Vicksburg has more grassy lots than even 20 years ago. Is this the fate of small towns in America?

Vicksburg in the Old Days (the '90s)

No, not the 1890s, the 1990s. I recently rummaged through some of my negatives and was horrified that they were already 20 years old. I suppose you are officially an old geezer when you think something is not particularly old but your co-workers would consider them so 20th century or so non-digital (you mean, like chemical-based?). This "old days" post will consist of a semi-random walk around Vicksburg with film.

This is Ryan's Coal Yard Package Store, at the corner of North Washington Street and First East. The building was torn down sometime in the early 2000s. At one time, this (or a predecessor building) was a coal yard. It was right next to the railroad tracks, and most Vicksburg homes heated with coal before the 1930s. (Trivia fact: Coal fires caused cinders that occasionally escaped from chimneys. Therefore, most older homes were re-roofed with asbestos shingles in the 1920s and '30s because the asbestos was fire-proof.) This is a Kodak Tri-X 400 frame taken with a Nikon F3 camera.

This is the warehouse right across the street from the Ryan Coal Yard. The place is empty and for sale now. The Fina gasoline station in the distance is where Klondike restaurant is now located.

This is L D's Kitchen at 1111 Mulberry Street, just a short distance south of the Ryan Coal Yard. The building is still in use as a restaurant. At one time, it was a package store and then a lounge. This is a photograph taken with a 35mm Summicron-RF lens on a Leica.

Here are three shotgun shacks, possibly off Clay Street. Many of these have been torn down in the last two decades.

This is the old commercial building at 719 Grove Street. It was condemned for over a year but is now being restored. This is a Polaroid Type 54 instant print taken with a 90mm ƒ/6.8 Raptar lens on a 4×5" Tachihara camera.

Right across Grove Street from the commercial block was the Vicksburg Steam Laundry. It was formed in 1910 and closed some time before 1985. The laundry was in the building that previously housed the first commercial Coca-Cola bottling plant in the country. The building burned in the early 1990s. The rumor is that someone started to redevelop it but found asbestos, so instead torched it. That way, the fire department took care of the problem by washing the asbestos down the storm drains.

The Jackson Street YMCA was demolished in 1995. It was built in 1924 and served the African American community. When it was built, YMCAs were segregated. Notice "Boys' Entrance" above the door. The Jackson Street Community Center, address 923 Walnut Street, now occupies this lot.

Heading south along the river, this is the Riverview Motel at 4009 Washington Street. The site is an empty lot now. This is a Polaroid 4×5" sepia instant print.

This view south along Washington Street looks about the same today. The old motel that resembles a barracks is still in business.

This is a former gas station converted into a motel or apartment on Washington Street, with a river view. The building was demolished in the early 2000s. This is another Polaroid 4×5" sepia instant print.

This is the Carr School on Cherry Street. The hulking building had been closed for decades and lay vandalized, an eyesight to drivers entering town via Halls Ferry Road and Cherry Street. Fortunately, it was restored in 2014 and is now used as apartments.

Back to Clay Street, this is the Junius Ward YMCA at 821 Clay. It has been closed for over a decade, but in 2014, I saw some renovation underway at an erratic pace.

The residence halls in the "Y" were last used in the late 1970s. On contemporary standards, the accommodations were rather basic (What, no air-conditioning? Quelle horreur!), but served as temporary residence for hundreds of men who moved to Vicksburg, including two of my friends.

Further east, this is the lot next to the old Vicksburg Ford at 2704 Clay Street. The garage (on the right) now houses TD's Tires. The apartments at the back are an odd architectural design, suspended between telephone posts driven into the ground. The apartments are occupied by a mixed clientele.

Turn around 180 degrees and look north; the old Mercy Hospital was a block away. It may have been named Parkview in 1996, but I can't remember. The little cottage at the very left, facing Clay Street, may have been the home of J. Mack Moore, the photographer who took hundreds of photographs of Vicksburg in the late 1800s and early 20th century. Mack Moore coated his own glass plates and used a large format camera. When the house was demolished, stacks of his glass negatives were found in the basement, some of which he had recycled for use as window panes. The collection is now at the Old Court House Museum.

Proceed north on North Washington about 5 miles and you reached Margaret's Gro, which the Reverend Dennis had converted to his Temple to God.

The Reverend had a creative streak with bricks, paint, wood, Styrofoam, and anything else he could glue or cement in place. He told me that he learned his brick skills from German bricklayers. He had been a prison guard for World War II prisoners and learned from his charges. Even as late as the 2000s, German tourists came to see Margaret's Gro. (Another trivia item: Germans soldiers were terrified of American black soldiers because of the gruesome stories they had been told by their propaganda machine. Therefore, they tended to be pretty docile when guarded by black soldiers.)

In February, 1989, an ice storm knocked down power lines all over Mississippi. Some parts of Vicksburg were without electricity for almost a week. This is a view of Drummond Street.

Here are two more views of the 1989 ice storm. These are scans of 4×5" Polaroid Type 54 film.

These cottages are on the slope below West Pine Street, just west of the old bus barn. The Kansas City Southern railroad tracks are just below. At one time, there was quite a community of little houses along this slope, but most have been torn down, and the kudzu has taken over. I recall some of these residents had vegetable and corn gardens.

In the future, I will scan more negatives.