More Deserted Winter Beaches: Porto Germeno, Attica, Greece

Porto Germeno (also known as Aegosthena) is a quiet little resort in Western Attica facing the northeast Gulf of Corinth. It is about 70 km from Athens and in summer must have a busy clientele on weekends.

December is another story. Most of the tavernas are closed, some sealed up with plastic. The wind howls off the Corinthian Gulf and the place has a forlorn look.


Surprisingly, we found one taverna open. The cook was there alone and he started a kerosene heater in one of the pavilions. We sat around in jackets and mittens, but soon the temperature was comfortable. Soon he served a delicious meal: fresh grilled fish, fried potatoes, salads. How do these Greeks do it, and in the middle of winter in a remote tiny town?

The photograph above gives you an idea why it can be rough reaching Porto Germeno in December. We had to leave the 2-wheel drive car in a village and all squeeze into the jeep. Winter is fun.

The Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital, Yazoo City

The Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital was a pioneering medical institution and possibly the only health care resource for African Americans residents of west central Mississippi during the mid-20th century. According to Wikipedia, "The Afro-American Sons and Daughters was a fraternal organization in Mississippi and one of the leading black voluntary associations in the state. Organized in 1924, it had 35,000 members by the 1930s. The founder of the group was Thomas J. Huddleston, Sr., a prosperous black entrepreneur and advocate of Booker T. Washington's self-help philosophy." The hospital was built in 1928 and provided health care, including major surgery, until 1972, when it closed forever.


As you can see from these photographs, the hospital is in poor condition. Plants are taking over the site, parts of the roof have failed, and the floors are rotting. When I walked inside, I immediately smelled the odor of damp, decaying wood. A big tree in the back fell in a storm and crashed through the roof. That part of the building in imploding. The building, at 8th St. and Webster Ave. in Yazoo City, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Sadly, that distinction does not retard decay from the elements.

On contemporary standards, the hallways and rooms were small and cramped. The paint was that infamous institutional green that you see in schools and older public buildings everywhere. The hospital had one floor on a design with three wings (like a letter "E"). Large louvered openings in the ceiling once held vent fans to provide air flow during hot summers. I hope the operating rooms were cooled, but I suspect not.


I read about this site in the Mississippi Heritage Trust 2007 list of 10 Most Endangered Historic Places. The article states that the building underwent a major change in 1935 when another wing was added. The hospital campus included a residence for its nurses.

The room above may have been a ward with several beds. It was so dark, I could barely see the outlines of the far wall. I am often amazed how effective digital cameras are in low light. Open the shutter and let the sensing elements continue to record light until they receive enough energy to form the image. In the film era, I would have used a Luna-Pro light meter to make an incident light measurement, then add two, three, or more f-stops to the measurement to allow for film reciprocity failure. And the colors would have shifted.

A interesting paper by David T. and Linda R. Beito (Social Science History. 2006; 30: 551-569) describes the history of the Afro-American hospital and outlines the grim reality of health care for poor Blacks in the 1920s in Mississippi.

Here is the abstract:

"Under the burden of Jim Crow, how did African Americans obtain health care? For nearly 40 years the Afro-American Hospital of Yazoo City, Mississippi, was a leading health care supplier for blacks in the Mississippi Delta. It was founded in 1928 by the Afro-American Sons and Daughters, a black fraternal society, and provided a wide range of medical services. The society, which eventually had 35,000 members, was led by Thomas J. Huddleston, a prosperous black entrepreneur and advocate of Booker T. Washington's self-help philosophy. The hospital had a low death rate compared to other hospitals that served blacks in the South during the period. It ceased operation in 1966 as a fraternal entity after years of increasingly burdensome regulation, competitive pressure from government and third-party health care alternatives, and the migration of younger dues-paying blacks to the North."

Please click the link for some views of the rest of Yazoo City. Thank you for reading.

Photographs taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera, tripod-mounted.

Jackson Minicipal Library

The Mississippi Heritage Trust included the Jackson Municipal Library on their 2005 list of "10 Most Endangered Historic Places." I have driven along North State Street many times but never before paid attention to the unused rectangle limestone building across the street from the Welty library (Jackson's current public library). This is the site of the 1961 incident when the "Tougaloo Nine" tried to read books that were not available at the inferior Carver Library, the facility that blacks were forced to use then. The police ordered the students to leave, and when they refused, they were arrested. This building should be preserved as one of the many sites where the civil rights movement began to change America.

This 1954 structure was built in a stern 1950s post-art-deco blockhouse design, but it's not as bad as it sounds. The windows are shaded by ledges and overhangs, and the aluminum or steel frames lend an air of symmetry. Ledges like this were popular through the 1960s but you seldom see them on new buildings. Why not? The sun still shines.

Do any of you readers remember fallout shelters? In the 1950s, office buildings and institutions all over the United States had these yellow and black signs with the ominous triple triangles. Ironically, the signs were so well made, they have outlasted the Soviet Union and you still see them mounted on older buildings if you look carefully. In the old days, fallout shelters were stocked with cans of water, dry foods, and sturdy plastic bags (to use as toilets - really!).

The inside of the old municipal library does not look like much any more. The low ceilings and low-grade Sheetrock construction are rather depressing. What will be its fate? The City of Jackson does not have a very good record of preserving its historic buildings, and increasingly severe budget problems will impose even more neglect in years to come.

The windows on the ground floor are shielded with black cloth inner panels, but I was able to take these photographs over the top of some of the panels where they did not extend up to the window frame. It underscores why it is handy to use a camera with an articulated viewing screen (somewhat similar to holding an old Rolleiflex camera upside down over a crowd or above a fence).

All photographs taken with a Sony DSC-R1 camera, hand-held.

November 15, 2010 update: A reader kindly provided a link to an article from the Northside Sun Magazine which describes how the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board bought the building in 2009. Earlier, the Duckworth Realty Company tried to convert the building into loft apartments, but the plan did not work out:

http://northsidesun.com/printer_friendly/2276212

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.)