Abandoned Utica High School, Utica, Mississippi

Utica is a small town in Hinds County about half way between Vicksburg and Crystal Springs. Like many towns throughout Mississippi, especially in the Delta, that I have described in these pages, Utica must have been active and prosperous decades ago. Today, it is a sad place; most of the stores are boarded up, there is little commercial activity. A few years ago, a block of the former commercial shops on Depot Street were dismantled for their bricks. Drive west out of town on West Main Street, turn left on Carpenter Street, and the old high school is on the left. Built in 1948, it is a traditional brick building with large windows and a cheerful look.

The large windows date to the time before air conditioning was installed in schools, and the natural light reduced the need for fluorescents.

Two of my friends attended Utica HS. One of them told me that it originally was for African-American students in grades 9-12. Students in grades 1-8 attended Mixon Elementary Colored School, a few miles north. In 1970, Utica's schools were integrated, and the first mixed black and white class met in Utica HS that year. It was renamed Utica Consolidated High School. With a satellite building to the east (now a grass field), the new consolidated school held about 800 students in six grades, with about 500 in high school.

The building has a fallout shelter in the basement. That dates it to the early cold war era, the time of "duck and cover." I recall air raid practice in elementary school in New York City in 1961. My grandmother lived in Berlin in World War II, and from her descriptions of bombings, I was familiar with the concept of a shelter.

The inner hallways were decorated with that terrible green industrial paint you see in mid-20th century schools and asylums throughout the country.

This building is still in reasonably good condition. As usual, I can't understand why a school system abandons a facility in sound condition. You wonder who really benefits from new school construction -  empire-building by bureaucrats perhaps? Kickbacks from the construction trade?

The transoms are another example of ventilation in a pre-air-conditioning era.

The Gold Waves were the basketball team.  They won many athletic events.  The trophy racks and the fantastic purple wall were in the athletic building just to the south of the main school. The roof of the field house is collapsing now and the gymnasium is a mess.

Photographs are from a Panasonic G1 digital camera with Lumix 14-45 mm lens, tripod-mounted.

Levee Street Railroad Warehouse Demolition, Vicksburg, Mississippi

The 1870s warehouse/office, built by the Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway, has been demolished. The photograph above shows the site at the Kansas City Southern railroad yard on Levee Street, Vicksburg. Please see the August entry for photographs of the standing building. I was out of town when it was torn down and do not know what happened to the bricks.

Update Sep. 3, 2017: I added this 1990 photograph of the warehouse to remind viewers of its once handsome appearance. This is a scan of a 4×5-inch Fujichrome 50 transparency, taken on a B&J camera.
The rail yard is much quieter now than before the spring 2011 Mississippi River flood. Ten and twenty years ago, the yard was always packed with rail cars, but now the tracks are mostly empty.
Here is a photograph from 1990 taken from the ramp that leads to a gate in the flood wall. The cars belong to workers who are offshore. As you can see, the rail yard is well-filled with rail cars. (Scanned from a Polaroid Type 54 4×5-inch print, taken with a Tachihara 4×5" camera with 90mm f/6.8 Wollensak Raptar l

ens).

Railroad Warehouse, Levee Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Drive on Levee Street in Vicksburg south of the waterfront and the casino, and you soon reach the Kansas City Southern railroad yard. This is a historic railroad yard and has been in continuous use since before the Civil War. There is still a turntable, and there was once a brick roundhouse, but it was demolished sometime in the 1970s, I was told. One remnant of the 1800s remains, a forlorn and sad but once handsome brick building. According to the Vicksburg Post (20 January 2008), it was once a warehouse and work shop for steam engine supplies, but it now sits neglected and deteriorating.

Some Vicksburg residents do not know about the warehouse. The view above shows the railroad yard from Klein Street, looking west. The steel building beyond is part of the Anderson Tully wood mill.

This is the west side of the building, seen from Levee Street. A marble plaque above the louvered entry shows "L. N. O. & T. 1890, R.T. Wilson, President, J.M. Edwards, Vice Pres." According to the Mississippi Rails web page, the abbreviation stood for the Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway, in operation from 1884 to 1892. It was sold to the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad in October of 1892 (this is the name on the Vicksburg Depot, highlighted in a previous blog entry this year). As of December 2010, the plaque had disappeared from the facade.

The south side has a section of wall that is collapsing. Some of the window sashes had broken and the glass has fallen out.


The north side had a loading dock. Overall, it is in as bad condition as the south side.

As of 2010, many of the windows were broken. Sad, this was a handsome building in its day with nice proportions.


The rooms inside have old tools and furniture strewn about. I have never been able to walk inside but could take photograph through the windows.

The handcart above is the type you see in old movies where the porter takes the elegant passengers' luggage into the terminal, with dramatic lighting, steam hissing from the locomotives, and the couple smoking into each others faces (and then kissing without brushing their teeth).

Ledgers were kept in a pre-computer age.

According to the Vicksburg Post article, there are no plans to restore the building, and calls to Kansas City Southern railroad were not returned. Another piece of our heritage will soon be lost.

Finally, here is the turntable I mentioned earlier. KCS rebuilt it about 20 years ago. The old one looked like it had the original timbers and machinery from 100 years ago. I do not know how often it is used. The brick engine barn (roundhouse) would have been located about where the modern steel shed is situated. In the old days, all railroad yards needed a turntable because steam locomotives did not run in reverse as efficiently as forward. Therefore, the easiest way to turn them around was to place them on a turntable. There is less need now because modern diesel/electric locomotives run in either direction.

This the the motor and chain mechanism to spin the turntable. It had to be robust because of the weight of the locomotives. Notice the disk brake mechanism.

(2008 photographs taken with an Olympus E-330 digital camera, tripod-mounted. 2010 photographs with a Sony DSC-R1 camera. The turntable photograph was taken with an Olympus 9-18mm lens at the 9mm setting (equivalent to 18 mm on 35 mm film) on a Panasonic G1 camera.)

2014 update: I added two photographs.

Crumbling: the Yazoo County Agricultural High School, Benton Mississippi

In August of 2009, Mississippi Preservation wrote about the abandoned Yazoo County Agricultural High School in Benton, MS. This inspired me to visit Benton with an out-of-town friend who shares my interest in exploring fading architecture and the remnants of our industrial society. We did not expect much but were disappointed to see that: 1. The 1930-vintage brick school building is deteriorating quickly; 2. The wood building housing treachers' apartments had just been demolished.

The brick building, built in 1930 by Lumbergh & Hayes (Canton architects/builders), had the classic school architecture with large windows to let in light and, in a pre-air conditioning era, fresh air. I like the arch over the main door. Students pass through with a sense that they are entering an important place. Also, windows allow the students to have a connection with nature, so much nicer than modern mega-schools that resemble prisons.

From the outside, the building appears sound, but look in through the windows and the deterioration is evident. The main hallway runs longitudinally through the building. Transoms would have allowed air flow on hot days. Notice the radiator, originally for a hot water or steam heat system.



The rooms were high-ceilinged and had been painted with the ghastly industrial green pigment (the stuff that resists body fluids). Notice in last photograph, the floor has caved in and fallen down to the former crawl space.

The wood teachers' apartment building had just been razed. I met the owner of the property, a builder (investor?) from Vicksburg. He recently bought the land from Yazoo County and had to knock down the wood building because it was imploding and dangerous. He was concerned that vagrants might get hurt in it. As you can see in the photograph above, all that is left is a pile of sticks and rubble. I'm surprised they could not recycle joists, but maybe the rot or termite damage was too extensive. The owner said someone had approached him to buy the bricks in the school building, but he was not interested in the offer.

Some of the books were rather interesting, basic science texts without the fluff and political correctness idiocy found in contemporary textbooks. Who read these books, and did they continue on to college?

All photographs taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera, tripod-mounted. Hint: always use a tripod for architecture and static subjects.

For more information: Mississippi Preservation

The Junius Ward Johnson YMCA, Vicksburg, Mississippi

In the early 1920s, Mrs. Fannie Vick Willis Ward donated funds to the Young Men's Christian Association to build a new YMCA facility in Vicksburg. The Junius Ward Johnson YMCA at 821 Clay Street was dedicated in 1923. Fannie, a modest and generous lady, sat in the audience. The new building, a handsome brick structure with a red clay roof, was located at the intersection of Clay and Monroe Streets in what was then the bustling heart of a thriving commercial and industrial city. Originally, the building had only three floors, but in 1925, workers removed the roof and added a fourth floor with 33 more residence rooms.

The new building was state-of the art at that time and featured steam radiator heat, bathrooms on each of the residence floors, a gymnasium/theater, and a swimming pool in the basement. The pool was tiled and of the most modern, sanitary construction according to standards of the 1920s.

When I moved to Vicksburg in the 1980s, the lower two floors were still regularly used for civic functions. The swimming pool was the only one in town with heat for winter use. I do not know the original configuration of the locker room. A ladies changing room had been added, but this would not have existed in the 1920s.

YMCA swimming pool in 2005 (Tri-X film, Tachihara 4×5" camera, 75mm ƒ/8 Super-Angulon lens)

On the 3rd and 4th floors, young gentlemen could rent a modest and clean room for weeks or months. This was a common practice in the early-mid-20th century and was less expensive than staying in a hotel. My father lived in YMCAs in the 1930s and 1940s in Providence, Boston, New York, and other cities for periods of weeks at a time.

Up through the 1970s, it was still common practice for single men newly-hired at the Waterways Experiment Station to live in the "Y" for months or sometimes years. They had to dine somewhere else, a service that was fulfilled by boarding houses in the vicinity. The normal pattern was for the young gent to eventually meet a young lady via church, sports, or club activity, get married, and then move to a suburban house. The gentleman in the photograph below is a former resident. He was a world-famous earthquake mechanics scientist in the Geotechnical Laboratory.

Another friend and coworker said when he moved to the "Y" in 1968, the rent was $30/month. For breakfast, many of the gents went to Crawley's Pool Hall, which put on a generous spread for $1. In the evening, they ate at the Glass Kitchen for a home-style $1 dinner or at other downtown eateries. Every night from 7-9 pm, a basketball game was open to anyone, after which the guys would go out to a bar for a beer. At that time, there were numerous bars downtown.

On our contemporary standards, the residence rooms are tiny, cramped monk's cells with a narrow bed and one electric outlet. The one tiny closet would barely hold our clothes, let alone all the other junk we drag around as part of our modern lifestyle. The rooms were not air-conditioned, but the doors had wood louvers. In hot weather, hall fans provided a constant breeze, and by leaving a window open, a breeze would keep the rooms bearable (on pre-1970s standards).

Residence room (Kodak Panatomic-X film, Rolleiflex 3.5E camera, 75mm Xenotar lens)

The Junius Ward residence floors ceased operation between 1978 and 1980. First, the YMCA closed the upper 33 rooms on the fourth floor, and then closed the third floor. This was the result of increasing competition from apartments around town, and possibly also a trend for YMCAs to convert to family-style recreation facilities. With lack of use, this part of the building deteriorated steadily thereafter.

Vicksburg YMCA moved to a new location in 2002 and sold their historic Clay Street building to a Nashville developer, who planned to convert the space to condominiums. The plans never materialized. The building remained unoccupied until about 2003 or 2004, when Keystone Ministries moved in. Pastor James Hartley kindly let me take photographs at that time. The ministry did some renovations, but the building needed too many repairs for them to be able to continue. Since about 2006, the building has been unused. Several potential developers have looked, but the cost of renovations has scared them off. Before it could be reoccupied, it would need fireproof stairs, major roof repair, and other significant upgrades. It languishes empty, slowly deteriorating.

Photography technical notes:

• Rectangle black white photographs: Taken in 2005 with Kodak Tri-X Professional film in a Tachihara 4x5 inch camera.
• Square black and white: Kodak Tri-X film and Panatomic-X in a Rolleiflex 3.5E camera (75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens)
• Square color: Kodak Ektar 25 Professional film in a Rolleiflex 3.5F camera (75mm ƒ/3.5 Planar lens)
• Rectangle color: Kodak Kodachrome 25 film in a Leica rangefinder camera

Click any photograph to enlarge it. Thank you to many Vicksburg friends who provided information and history.

UPDATE: November 2019, the old Y remains empty with no signs of activity or renovation.