Jackson Street Branch YMCA, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Long-time residents of Vicksburg will remember that the YMCA once had two branches in town. The main facility was the handsome brick building at 821 Clay Street (see the 2010 article for interior photographs). A prominent local citizen, Mrs. Junius Ward, provided funds for this structure as a memorial to her husband.  But this was the era of segregation, so Mrs. Ward generously provided funds for a separate YMCA building on Jackson Street for African-American men. The Jackson Street Branch opened in 1924 and remained in service until the early 1990s. It was demolished in 1995 to make way for a new community center (the formal address is 923 Walnut Street).

As the photographs show, the Jackson Street branch was a handsome and formal 2-floor brick building with "1924" engraved in the panel above the entry door. It contained some residence rooms like the ones in the Clay Street branch.

I never went inside while it was in operation, but took photographs when it was being demolished.

Interior view of auditorium, taken during demolition.  Leica M3 with 135mm Tele-Elmar lens.

Photograph taken with a Leica M3 and the 8-element 35 mm f/2 Summicron-RF lens.

The gymnasium once occupied a big section of the building. Up through the 1970s, the famous Red Tops held rehearsals every Monday evening at the Jackson Street Y, possibly in this space. As you can see, construction was substantial. I often wonder why the wood beams and bricks were not recycled rather than just crushed and trucked away.

Finally, here is another interesting structure, a remnant of the architecture that once dominated Vicksburg. This Queen Anne-style building is at 916 Walnut Street. In 1992, it was used by the Elks Club, but another fraternal organization occupies it now. As of 2013, it is on the City's condemned list. Notice the roof, covered with zinc or galvanized roof shingles.

The first photograph was taken with a Pentax Spotmatic camera with 150 mm Super-Takumar lens on Kodachrome 25 film. Black and white photographs taken with a Leica M3 rangefinder camera with 35mm f/2.0 Summicron-RF lens (the famous first generation 8-element version) and 135mm Tele-Elmar lens on Kodak Tri-X film. The square frames were taken with a Rolleiflex 3.5E camera on Kodak VPS HC film (another great emulsion that is now discontinued).

Decay in South Chicago, Illinois

South Chicago is generally considered to be the area south of Hyde Park, or south of the Midway Plaisance. Technically, South Chicago is one of the city's 16 lakefront communities, but the term more broadly applies to many southern communities near Lake Michigan. This was a growing and dynamic area during the turn of the 20th century, and was home to various immigrant groups whose members worked in thriving steel, railroad, and other manufacturing industries. From the 1920s through the 1960s, African Americans, escaping oppression and segregation in the South, moved to Chicago in great numbers. A Wikipedia article on South Side provides a good background on demographics, culture, and institutions of this amazingly diverse area.

From the architecture, you can tell that the early 20th century developers took pride in their town. Buildings have decorative elements and skillfully applied trim, construction was robust, and materials were vastly better than what you see in new shoddy commercial buildings. Workmen, such as the stone carvers from Italy, often were highly-skilled.

After World War II, economic patterns changed, and today, much of South Chicago (except right along the lakefront) is run-down and grubby. Crime is endemic. Many storefronts are boarded up, and you see far too many liquor and pay-day loan stores, but almost no grocers.

This is the view south along South Cottage Grove Avenue taken from the 63rd Street Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) station. The train is elevated here (the "L"), so it was one of the only spots to get an elevated viewpoint. You can see that the buildings were sturdy and somber, built to last. I used a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera with Kodak Tri-X film and braced it on a railing. 

The CTA runs regular buses in this area. I assume many of the residents work downtown, but it is a long and inefficient ride to the central business district. I have taken the bus, and some rather sketchy characters get on and off.

Hair and cosmetics may be among the few business to thrive in this area now. These are on South Cottage Grove and East 65th.

This is the Emmanuel Outreach Deliverance Temple on East 65th Street. What was once plate-glass window is covered with plywood. Expansive windows imply a degree of security and confidence that whatever is displayed in the windows will be safe.

For residents closer to the lake, the Metra is an alternate way to go downtown or south to the Indiana lakeshore. This is the station on East 63rd. When I took the Amtrak to Mississippi, the train came along these tracks after it left Union Station downtown.

This is an example of the type of row house that was once common on residential streets. It was sturdy and built to last. Today, many blocks have open spaces without houses. The gaps are not as extensive as you see in Detroit, but still, it is obvious that the lots had once been developed. An architect told me that many of the now empty lots were burned in the race riots of the 1960s and never redeveloped.

A few blocks west, you see more evidence of early-20th century industry and prosperity. This terracotta exterior building was built in 1914 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It may now be the home of the Butternut Bread Company.

Crime is a real problem and probably accounts for the lack of restaurants in South Chicago. This is the famous Uncle John's BBQ on East 69th street. It is typical of the genre. You enter a vestibule and order your food through a grated opening or speaking tube. You pay through a small slot. Then your food is placed in a carousel, which the proprietor rotates around so you can pick up your order. I visited Uncle John's on a blazing hot August afternoon. The people in line were very friendly and seemed genuinely glad to see a visitor. It was un-air conditioned and the fans were loud, but the other patrons translated for me when I could not hear the serving people behind the glass panels. I asked someone why there were no picnic tables out on the grass lot next door so people could sit out and eat. A couple of gents laughed and said, "You don't live here, do you?" I ended up driving many miles west to a park in the Hispanic area and eating the BBQ there; the ribs really were delicious.

The University of Chicago in Hyde Park is one of the nation's premier research universities (87 faculty Nobel prize recipients). It has a famous physics program (remember Enrico Fermi and the first controlled nuclear chain reaction?), the internationally-regarded Booth School of Business, and economics program (the Chicago school of economics). The library system rivals any in the nation outside of the Library of Congress. The Gothic architecture is magnificent and worthy of its own blog article. These photographs show examples of campus architecture.

In the early 20th century, Hyde Park was the fashionable and wealthy South Side neighborhood, but the area took a nosedive after school integration in the 1960s. There was massive white flight to the suburbs and the area was plagued by racial conflict, crime, and property deterioration. Hyde Park has gentrified, but an architect told me that the turnaround had taken 50 years! Nevertheless, housing for students can be a challenge. Many of the commercial apartments are a bit rough, to put it mildly. This is the back courtyard of a unit on South Woodlawn. I was astonished that the fire stairs were wood. Some laundry on lines and a goat or two, and you could be in a New York tenement in the early 1900s.

Further west, off Central Avenue, another cosmetic supply store! I guess hair really is a big business.

The square black and white photographs were taken with a Rolleiflex 3.5E with Xenotar lens on Kodak Tri-X Profesional film, developed in Kodak HC-110 developer. I really like the square frame for urban photography. The color pictures are from a Sony DSC-W7 compact digital camera.

Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 in New Jersey

Hurricane (super storm) Sandy caused immense damage to New York, New Jersey, and surrounding areas on October 29, 2012. The storm, which killed 230 people, cause up to $75 billion in losses, according to the National Hurricane Center (2012 estimate). This was not the first major storm to destroy property and beaches along the Jersey shore.

New Jersey has been struck with damaging hurricanes and northeasters many times. These black and white aerial photographs of Ventnor-Atlantic City, Brigantine, and Barnegat Lighthouse areas were taken on 15 September 1944, and 24 October 1944. They show damage to the boardwalk and to structures caused by the "Great Atlantic Hurricane" of 13-14 September, 1944. The storm first made landfall as a Category 3 near Cape Hatteras. It moved out to sea again and made a second landfall on eastern Long Island on September 14, after causing significant damage along the New Jersey shore. Of the 390 people who perished, 340 were lost on ships at sea (some of them servicemen on convoys). The storm was so powerful, it sank the US Navy destroyer USS Warrington (DD-383) about 700 km east of Vero Beach, FL, with a loss of 248 sailors (see The Dragon's Breath: Hurricane at Sea by Robert A. Dawes (Jr.), Naval Institute Press, Mar 1, 1996 - 222 pages).

The low death toll on land was due to well-executed warnings and evacuations, a result of the bitter lessons of the great New England Hurricane of 1938. However, thousands of houses and businesses were destroyed and damaged along the Jersey shore. Pielke and Landsea (1998) calculated the total damage in 1995 Dollars to be $6.5 billion. (See: Pielke, R.A., Jr., and Landsea, C.W. 1998. Normalized hurricane damages in the United States:  1925-95. Weather and Forecasting, 13(3), 621–631).

This is the Heinz Pier at Atlantic City. Part of it was washed out, and the boardwalk behind was torn off. The Pier, formerly known as the Iron Pier, was so badly damaged that it was later demolished.

Here are three views of Ventnor, already a major urban area in 1944. Here too, the boardwalk has been damaged, and considerable sand overwashed onto the streets. But the houses look intact.

Here is an art deco apartment building with a handsome Tudor-style hotel facing the ocean. The art deco building is still standing, but the hotel is gone.

This is the famous Steel Pier with amusements and shows. Notice the bleachers facing the sea at the end of the pier. These were for air shows the water circus. 

Two historical post cards of the Steel Pier. During the War, this was a popular destination for servicemen on leave. The Steel Pier still exists, but I am not sure if it occupies exactly the same footprint.

Here is a lower-elevation photograph of the north end of Atlantic City at Absecon Inlet.

An apartment building in Atlantic City lost one wall. Note how the hot water radiators remained upright despite the wall falling away. Also note how the interior walls were plaster lath - high-quality construction.

A damaged pier separated from the land. The surf lifted the boardwalk boards from their supports.

These two frames show Brigantine, New Jersey, with the last shot looking south towards Atlantic City. In 1944, Brigantine was still a new development, and many of the lots were empty. Look at Google Maps to compare with the urban sprawl today.

Just look at the flat and low terrain. Do you think it is vulnerable to storms? Should we as a society collectively be responsible for their rebuilding costs? Do tax receipts and tourist revenues repay the cost of rebuilding after storms? Should we socialize the risk (which we have, of course) while developers and speculators reap the initial benefits? These are serious questions to ponder, and we failed miserably and cowardly to address these issues after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 on the Gulf Coast.

The source of original paper prints is the archive of the Beach Erosion Board (predecessor of the former Coastal Engineering Research Center), presently stored at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. Original image condition: excellent, with full tonal range, printed on single-weight glossy paper. The printing date is unknown but believed to be 1944. The prints are in a BEB folder labeled 11-12, 11-13, 11-14, and 11-15. The photographic platform is unknown, but possibly a blimp. The BEB index book cites the U.S. Navy as source. Camera, focal length, film: unknown. The frames were not taken on a 9x9-inch aerial camera but on some other camera with a frame size approx. 6x7 inch. Total number of frames is 11. The filename includes a 4-digit number, which was written in pencil on the back of each frame.

For more information on historical hurricanes and construction of storm surge barriers in New England and New Jersey, see:

Morang, A. 2007. Hurricane Barriers in New England and New Jersey – History and Status After Four Decades, Technical Report ERDC/CHL TR-07-11, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS

Morang, A. 2016. Hurricane Barriers in New England and New Jersey: History and Status after Five Decades. Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 32, Issue 1: pp. 181 – 205.

For more information on the Beach Erosion Board archives, see:

Morang, A.  2003.  Regional coastal photographic archive of the Beach Erosion Board.  Shore & Beach, Vol 71, No. 4, pp. 17-21.

Update 2017: An article in Politico describes how the National Flood Insurance Program encourages people to build in flood-prone areas and rewards them to file claims after storm events. In effect, it is a giant subsidy to the building and development industry.

Bridges of Redwood, Yazoo River, Mississippi

For decades, drivers on Highway 61 (the Blues Highway) had to cross the Yazoo River at Redwood, Mississippi, on a handsome 1950-vintage steel cantilever bridge. Unfortunately, I do not have a photograph of the old bridge when intact. The old bridge was elegant in a mid-20th century industrial style, but no longer suited contemporary transportation needs. The two lanes were narrower than current standards, the bridge required expensive painting, and clearance was too low for some tall trucks.  Therefore, Mississippi Department of Transport (MDOT) built a modern concrete 4-lane bridge over the Yazoo a short distance south of the old structure. Rather than disassemble the old bridge, it was dropped in place using explosives on July 1, 2009. According to WJTV television, "The bridge was blown up at 7:50 a.m. and the blast was fueled by packets of explosives placed at strategic points by contractor Key Constructors. Boats on the Yazoo were halted as crews cleared the waterway." I missed the demolition because it was not announced to the public beforehand, but I drove to the site a few days later.

This photograph shows the east approach with some of the structure still standing.

This is the center span lying in the river. It must have taken several days to remove the debris, during which barge traffic would have been blocked. The Yazoo is a Federal navigation project, but commercial tonnage is low and the channel is seldom dredged.

A short distance to the south, out of sight of the highway bridge, is this abandoned railroad swing bridge. It has been unused since at least the 1980s. A few years ago, I read that these types of bridges were slowly disappearing from the US landscape, but one is still here.

The tracks and ties were removed a long time ago from the west side of the bridge. This is an example of the immense engineering infrastructure built by the railroads in the early 20th century. For many years, the best and brightest engineering students went to work for railroads because they offered the most challenging careers.

Finally, a slightly off-topic photograph. This is the auditorium of the Radwood elementary school on May 7, 2011, when the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers were at record flood levels. The school built temporary levees to keep out the water, and books, furniture, and other materials were moved to the auditorium, which was a bit higher than the other rooms. Fortunately, the flood waters did not reach the building and no equipment was damaged.

As a final example of bridges and railroad engineering, here is a monumental lift bridge on the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, Ohio. I have never seen this bridge in use, and it is rusting and deteriorating. But look at its massive construction.  I hope it will preserved as a mechanical or civil engineering monument. Also, look to the lower left and you can see a swing bridge similar to the one at Redwood.

Most photographs taken with an Olympus E-330 digital camera. The two sepia frames are from a Sony DSC-W7 compact camera.

Vicksburg Panorama 2004

This is an experiment, a panorama that I took from the roof of the two-floor brick building at the NW corner of Crawford and Monroe Streets. I am not sure if it will open up as a wide file in this blog software.

The view pans from the west to east and finally to southeast. The date was October 3, 2004. Little has changed from this viewpoint since I took this photograph. The YMCA is in the process of being repaired, including the tile roof.

Technical:  A friend loaned me a Canon PowerShot G6 digital camera.  I merged the frames with a Canadian panorama software, PanaVue ImageAssembler.

Amazing masonry: City Hall, Philadelphia

Philadelphia went through a rough time from the mid-1960s through the 1980s (I am not singling out Philadelphia; many American cities were pretty grim during that period). But today, downtown Philadelphia is reasonably clean, interesting, and fun to visit. It shows what can happen when a municipality does not allow urban decay to set in and take over.

The centerpiece of downtown is the monumental Empire-style City Hall, which occupies an entire block in the center of the city. According to Wikipedia, the building and was constructed from 1871 until 1901 at a cost of $24 million. It was designed by Scottish-born architect John McArthur, Jr. in the ornate Second Empire style. With almost 700 rooms, it is the largest municipal building in the United States and possibly one of the largest in the world.

This is a circa. 1899 photograph from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (online here).




Here is some of the architectural detail and statuary. The latter two photographs I took from my room in the Marriott Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown hotel. It would be hard to find a more convenient location.



The tower is quite an edifice, but unfortunately its impressive size is somewhat diminished by the tall office buildings nearby. The antenna spire is 548 ft up, and Wikipedia claims that from 1901 to 1908, this was the tallest habitable building in the world (the distinction is in contrast to religious buildings like cathedrals and monuments like the Eiffel tower). William Penn is on the top, and he is 11-m tall and faces northeast.

According to the Wikipedia article, in the 1950s, city fathers considered demolishing the city hall, but the cost would have been too high. I do not doubt this story; the 1950s may have been the low period in the American consciousness pertaining to historical preservation. Recall this was the era when the so-called "modern" interstates were slashed across cities, often chopping up historic ethnic neighborhoods. Suburbia and white flight reigned supreme during this period, and inner cities were left to deteriorate and fester. See Building Suburbia, Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 by Dolores Hayden for more details of the suburban flight and its consequences to American cities. Philadelphia's revived downtown shows that many people are finally returning to traditional cities, although the McMansion orgy of the 1990s-mid-2000s demonstrates a recent and gross extreme of the suburban flight trend.

Many other historical building around City Hall have been restored. Good for Philadelphia!

Even the streets have some interesting architectural elements.

This is the view east towards the Delaware River. The S.S. United States is moored at Pier 84 (the red funnels are barely visible in the photograph to the right).

This is the Capogiro Gelato & Sorbetto shop. It has some of the best gelato I have ever savored. Late evenings in summer, it is mobbed with students, businessmen, tourists, and local residents. I spoke to the owner one evening, and he said he toured dairy farms in Lancaster County to look for happy cows (in a similar way, that is why milk and butter is so good in France and Switzerland - the cows are happy).

Photographs taken with a Fujifilm F31fd digital compact camera.