The Beach in Winter

The beach in winter is a lonely place. The beach houses and cabanas seem to be waiting for happy families and energetic children to return. In the off season, bathhouses always interested me because of their symmetry. They have a transient appearance, but yet many are decades old.


These first two photographs are from the beach club at Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The bathhouse is built on a narrow sand spit, Napatree Point, that sticks out west into Long Island Sound. The second scene is looking north into Watch Hill Cove.



Drive a few miles east along the Atlantic shore of Rhode Island and you reach Misquamicut State Beach.



The parking lot view is a bit utilitarian, but the ocean side of the bathhouse is quite nice with its cheerful turquoise paint and expansive view of the ocean. The rows of sand fencing shows that the state workers are trying to trap as much sand as possible. Rhode Island's beaches have been retreating (eroding) for decades, but I am not sure what the rate has been here at Misquamicut.

Atlantic Avenue near Misquamicut has the normal beachy collection of motels, convenience stores, and restaurants. The one above has seen better days.

Rhode Island somehow avoided the most crass examples of late-20th century beach architecture, such as the giant pink shops selling swim suits and tee shirts. The monstrosity above was the former Souvenir City near Biloxi, Mississippi, in October 2006, over a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.


Let's move Across the Atlantic to the North Sea coast of the Netherlands. The cheerful little dressing cottages above are are on the island of Texel, near the resort town of Da Koog. Da Koog is popular with German tourists. They did not often see Americans there.

Now let's move south to the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. There is minimal tidal variation in the Gulf, but it experiences seiching (water set-up caused by steady wind pushing the water to one end of the basin). This is also a very seismically active area with opposite sides of the Gulf experiencing uplift or sinking at different rates.

This is a night club/bar near the town of Nerantza, a few kilometers west of Corinth. Note the umbrella posts in the water.

Even lake beaches have bathhouses. This is the Bains des Pâquis, in Geneva, Switzerland. The bath house and a small beach were built in 1872 on a pier that projects into Lac Leman. The present structures were rebuilt in 1932. The water is cold, even on a hot summer day. It is a relaxing way to spend a day if you are passing through Geneva.

There is a popular and modest-priced cafe at the Pâquis. If you don't finish your meal, a sparrow or duck will finish it off.

2018 update:  Here is a summer photograph of the Bains des Pâquis (scan from a Kodachrome slide, taken with a Leica M2 rangefinder camera using a 20mm f/5.6 Russar lens).

Lumber town: Berlin, New Hampshire

Berlin is a mill and paper town on the Androscoggin River in northern New Hampshire. Situated north of the White Mountains, it is about four hours drive from Boston and seems to be far away from anything.

Berlin was once a thriving industrial city. Prosperity in the early 20th century came from timber harvesting, lumber mills, and paper factories. Workers were a mix of ethnic groups, with many being French Canadians. Many families spoke French exclusively, and schools taught English a foreign language. Sadly, since World War II, the town has been on a steady decline, and a large paper mill closed recently.

Immigrant families lived in wood double- and triple-deckers. You find this type of semi-mass-produced housing in former industrial cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, but the architectural style was also used here in New Hampshire. I don't know how residents heated in the past; possibly boilers in the cellar used coal (brought in by railroad). Life in these tenements must have been dreary, but at least the men and women had jobs and dreamed of a better future. Some participated in winter sports. In 1882, a group of Scandinavians founded the nation's first ski club, named the Nansen Ski Club in honor of Fridtjof Nansen, the explorer who in 1888 skied across Greenland. Today, much of this housing stock is seedy and many units are empty.

You can still see elements of a prosperous past. The beautiful Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church overlooks the city from the west side of the valley.

It's interesting that the cornerstone was laid before the Bolshevik revolution.

July 2015 update: a friend sent me an article from the April 25, 2015, Conway Daily Sun,  The article states that the church was built by Russian immigrants who came to Berlin in the early 1900s to work in paper mills. By 1915, there were 300 Russian men in town, and in March of 2015, Father Arcady Piotrowsky of Cleveland was assigned to Berlin to help found the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church. (They liked long names then.) The church's icons may have been some of the last to leave Russia before Czar Nicholas II was overthrown. During the 20th century, the parish dwindled, and  the church closed in 1963. It remained empty for 11 years. In 1974, a family of one of the original founders asked to hold the funeral service at the closed church, and parishioners refurbished the domes and paintings. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

This factory/warehouse was sheathed with zinc plates patterned to look like cut stone blocks. This type of busy pattern, resembling limestone blocks, must have been popular in the late 1800s because early-vintage cinder blocks were also molded with this design.

I think this kind of sheathing was most commonly used before the 1940s. By the 1960s, aluminum siding became more popular than steel sheathing because it was lighter and easier to install.

I have seen other buildings with zinc sheathing in other parts of the country. One was a church in Johnson City, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson went to services. The old airport terminal near Tallulah, LA, where Delta Airlines started decades ago, had zinc roof tiles shaped to look like clay tiles.

It's sad to see a town like Berlin heading downhill, but what can replace traditional industries that employed a large workforce? Berlin was once called "Papertown,"but that era ended years ago. The last paper mill in northern New Hampshire, the Fraser Papers mill in Gorham, south of the Berlin-Gorham line, just closed. In Berlin's case, prisons provide some employment but the employment numbers are minor compared to the thousands who once cut and processed timber. You can read about Berlin in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_New_Hampshire

All photographs taken with a Fuji F31fd digital camera.

Lee Hall Village, Virginia

During a recent business trip, I came across a handsome depot in Lee Hall,Virginia (near Williamsburg, not in the best of condition but appreciated by a foundation and in process of being restored.

From Wikipedia: "Lee Hall Depot was a railroad station on the Peninsula Extension of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O), which was built through the area of Warwick County in 1881 to reach the new coal export facilities at Newport News on the port of Hampton Roads....Lee Hall Depot became a very busy railroad station after the establishment nearby of Fort Eustis (originally named Camp Abraham Eustis) in 1918, with freight and heavy troop movements."

"Lee Hall Depot (no longer is use) is the only surviving C&O structure of its type on the lower Peninsula. It is the only survivor among five stations which were located in Warwick County..." AMTRAK trains may stop here in the future. I am gratified to see historic buildings like this saved from being torn down. They say so much about how we built this nation and how people lived and worked. How many US troops and prisoners-of-war passed through this depot?

This former service station was across the street from the depot. Hundreds of these simple stations were built as the road system expanded in the 1920s and 1930s. Most are now gone, so it is nice to see this example still standing.

A contemporary Hummer or behemoth SUV would barely fit under this roof. (All photographs taken with a Sony DSC R-1 camera.)

Hangars at Naval Station Norfolk

Naval Station Norfolk covers about 3400 acres and is the largest naval station in the world. It is an immense complex of wharfs, warehouses, barracks, repair shops, hangars, offices, and runways. Thousands of servicemen, servicewomen, and civilians enter and leave every day as they do their work supporting fleet operation, repair and overhaul, and administrative duties. The base began operations in World War I and has been in continuous operation since then. You can read more about the base in Globalsecurity.org:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/norfolk.htm
History of the facility is here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/norfolk-history.htm



In 1940, with war imminent, the government dredged Willoughby Bay just north of the base and built hangars for seaplanes. I think the hangar in the photographs above is one of the 1940 units but am not sure. I saw workers inside but it was a hard hat area and I could not enter.

Looking through the building, you see Willoughby Bay through the hangar doors. The wharf facing the bay now has steel sheet pile bulkheads, but in the 1940s, there must have been ramps to allow seaplanes to be winched into the hangar.

The building consisted of steel girders and steel panels, assembled like a giant Meccano construction kit. I wonder if it was custom made or if some hangar company sold units in various standard sizes (the 100-ft unit, the 200-ft unit, etc.)?

At the northern tip of the base is the old degaussing station. Degaussing is a process to reduce the magnetic signature of a steel hull. The tower was formerly housed control building for the process but has been converted to some new test equipment (of undisclosed function).

(All photographs taken with a Sony R1 digital camera)

On the Beach, South Nags Head, North Carolina - 2010

East Seagull Drive, South Nags Head, North Carolina

South Nags Head is a summer playground of sun, surf, beer, and jolly good times. It's also an area of uncontrolled overbuilding on the rapidly eroding barrier island. These cottages on East Seagull Drive have been condemned because they are in imminent danger of collapsing into the surf. The view above is looking to the north, with the Atlantic Ocean to the right.The dune line is well landwards of the cottages.

The cottages were originally built on piles because in this environment, occasional flooding is inevitable. But as you can see in the photograph above, the beach has eroded so severely, the original piles were undermined. To keep the houses from collapsing, extension piles were added below the original ones. The bags are geotubes filled with sand to protect the houses. North Carolina law only allows such bags when a house is threatened. Also, North Carolina no longer allows any hard structures like rock seawalls to be erected as shore protection devices (Update: this may no longer be true as of 2020). I wish other states would follow this example.

Exposed septic tanks, South Nags Head, North Carolina

When the septic tanks are exposed (the concrete tubs above), the town or county condemns property. But then a major problem arises: what to do with the structures? FEMA formerly funded removal of houses, but I was told that the program ended. The town is taking legal action against the homeowners to remove them, but the town will not pay any of the costs. If the owners walk away and the structures collapse, the town would have to foot the bill for hazardous debris removal, not a trivial issue in the marine environment. Consider also that taking over the properties would not yield a salable commodity for the town. The town might do a beach nourishment to add enough sand to un-condemn the houses. Then they would be back on the tax rolls and generate revenue. It is an odd twist of logic.

Notice that even though only five years have passed since the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, we still are politically too cowardly to ask serious questions about whether people should live in hazardous locations, and whether municipalities have a responsibility to provide protection and services to residents of these hazardous areas. 

• Should developers be restricted by means of setback lines? 
• Why don't building codes require highly robust construction, thereby thwarting the quick buck artists who build shoddy homes and move on after selling to naive buyers? 
• Should the buyer beware? 
• Is uncontrolled building "capitalism," while spreading the rebuilding risk throughout the town/county is not considered "socialism"? 

These are all troubling questions.
The scene above shows swells from Hurricane Danielle on August 29, 2010. I took this photograph from the U.S Army Corps of Engineers' Field Research Facility (FRF) pier at Duck, NC. They are about 9-10 second period and approaching the coast at an unusually steep angle. The FRF has an excellent web page with live cameras, wave statistics, and other oceanographic data:

http://www.frf.usace.army.mil/

Lost architecture: Pearl Street, Vicksburg

Pearl Street is one of Vicksburg's older streets and one of its more interesting. It parallels the railroad line, which has run along here since before the Civil War. The architecture ranges from beautiful bed-and-breakfast homes to shotgun shacks. In the photograph above, the brick building to the left once housed Tuminello's Restaurant. It has been closed since the 1990s and the building stands empty. Visitors who have not been here recently occasionally ask me about it.
The land drops off quite steeply to the west, as you can see in this view of no. 1806. Like many early 20th century Vicksburg houses, the builders placed the front at ground level and had no qualms about supporting the rear on stilts, often 10 or 12 ft above the ground. This building has been razed. Houses can no longer be built on these steep lots anywhere in town.
Number 1804 was its neighbor, seen here in a 2002 photograph. It, too, has been razed.
At one time, there must have been tens of shotgun houses facing the tracks, but most have been torn down. The two above are at 2302 and 2304 (all square photographs are from a Rolleiflex camera using Kodak Ektar 25 film).
No. 2330 is a classic neighborhood store. In an era before people had private cars, the city had dozens of stores like this serving neighborhoods, but most have closed now.
Many of the houses on the 2400 and 2500 block dated from the late 1800s or early 20th century. One by one they have been torn down. The one above is no. 2414.

1997 photograph of 2521 Pearl Street, taken on Agfa Scala film.

The two houses above are 2515 and 2521. They had a view over the tracks and the railroad yard further down the hill along Levee Street. During the steam era, coal smoke must have deposited grime whenever a locomotive puffed by. Now the residents have to listen to the deafening horns of the diesel locomotives.
These two cottages above (nos 2529 and 2531) were identical architecture and are now gone. They were near the corner of Pearl and Fairground Street. Fairground will be the subject of a future essay.
No. 2607 was a handsome duplex.
Further north, near the former Vicksburg Lumber Co., was a trio of shotguns, nos. 2004, 2006, and 2008. As of 2016, the one on the right has been razed, and the two others are empty.

The photographs above are from a variety of early-vintage digital cameras and from film. The square frames are scans of Kodak Ektar 25 film shot through a Rolleiflex medium-format camera.

 UPDATE JULY 2021:  For a more complete inventory of Pearl Street houses, please click the links below

South of Fairground Street

Central section

North of Klein Street