Back to the Secret Playground of Vicksburg

My previous post on the Secret Playground of Vicksburg generated a lot of interest, so I thought I would take another look. This is early June, spring is in full blast, and the jungle is engulfing the site. It is a stroll down poison ivy lane to reach the playground equipment.

From what I can tell, no one has cut grass or done any other work for at least a year.

Just around the corner from the playground on Wisconsin Avenue, a fellow parked a classic Volkswagen Beetle on the grass about five years ago. And there it sat, year after year, slowly rusting and moldering. Originally it was in running condition. I once asked him about it, and he said he was going to restore it. Last week it was gone, and he said he had the tin man take it away. Pity.

He also had an old camper in the woods. He dismantled the camper part, leaving the cab as sort of an odd-looking pickup truck. You see a lot of unusual things like this in Vicksburg.  A few days later, even the cab and chassis were gone.

Just at the corner of Wisconsin and Confederate Avenues is Toots' Gro. This venerable establishment has been in business for decades and has an active lunch crowd. The CocaCola sign in the first photograph was identical to two or three others painted around town. The local bottler (now closed) may have been trying to invoke the old-time look to their advertisements. The sign is still there, but faded.

Confederate Avenue is worth exploring - park and walk around. This was once National Military Park property, but many years ago, the City and the National Park Service exchanged land, and this part of Confederate Avenue is now city-owned. But the statues and plaques remain in place. Some are in the woods almost hidden.

The playground photos were with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera with a Leitz 50 mm f/2 Summitar lens. The automobile photographs were taken with a Panasonic G3 camera with 14-45 mm Lumix zoom lens. The odd red color on the VW came from the Kodachrome 25 simulation in  DxO Filmpack 3, with the intensity slider at 100%. The photographs of Toots' Grocery are scans of color slides, taken with a Leica M3 camera. The bearded soldier is a crop from a Kodachrome slide.

Update March 2017: Toots Grocery is closed and the building is for sale.

Decaying Quickly: the Law House, Foote, Mississippi

A handsome white wood house faces Lake Washington in the hamlet of Foote.  Known as the Susie B. Law House, it has been neglected for 5 or 10 years and is decaying quickly. The vines are taking over, but at least in spring, you can see some of the structure.

The house is reputed to have been a kit home from Sears, Roebuck & Company.  If it was a kit, you can see the quality materials and the handsome windows. A Wikipedia article cites this reference: Hall, Russell S.; Nowell, Princella W.; Childress, Stacy. 2000. Washington County, Mississippi. Arcadia Publishing. It may have been "The Magnolia" Colonial design according to Searshomes.org. I am often surprised that we drifted away from these well-made kits with precision parts from a factory, and returned to a construction method where workers cut bulk materials on site. This latter method suffers from a lot of waste material and inefficiency (and, very often, sloppy workmanship). Look at the typical modern McMansion: you consider that precision craftsmanship??

The breezeway on the side was designed to let you unload a car with cover from rain or sun.  Someone has been here in the last few years, and the pillows looked reasonably fresh.

This was the only interior photograph I could take. A sign said, "No trespassing," so I did not venture inside. The roof is beginning to fail; see how the ceiling plaster is collapsing. It was plaster on wood lath.

A little hut in the side yard matched the main house. Was it a child's play cottage?

This is the view from the front yard of Lake Washington. It is a nice setting and superb for water fowl. Anhingas and Cormorants are common.

According to Wikipedia, the horror movie, Dark House, was filmed here in 2012. I have not seen it, but look at the official poster - it sure looks like the Law House. There is reputed to be a lot of paranormal activity here. Maybe I should return at dusk and take some more photographs....

Please click the link for some photographs of Mt. Holly, another decaying mansion just to the north.

Digital images taken with a Panasonic G3 camera with 9-18mm Olympus lens, processed with Picasa or PhotoNinja.

Update: Click the link for some film pictures of the Law House.

Update Nov. 2018: a very interesting web page describes the Sears Roebuck manufactured houses from the 1908-1940 era. The variety was amazing. Another web page, http://www.kithouse.org, describes research into kit houses around the USA.

On the Waterfront: the Detroit River

The city of Detroit is situated on the west side of the Detroit River. This river has great hydrologic, commercial, and ecological importance to the Lakes and the Upper Midwest.

First, the river connects the upper Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, and Huron) with Lake Erie to the south. This means that almost all the water from the upper lakes passes through this channel on its way to the lower lakes and, eventually, to the Atlantic Ocean.  The water flows southwest from Lake Huron via the St. Clair River to Lake St. Clair and thence through the Detroit River southwest and south past the city on the way to Lake Erie. (It is confusing, but one major water passage has two names.)

Second, the Detroit River today forms part of the most extensive inland deep-draft waterway in the world. The Great Lakes Waterway is also known as the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Ocean-going ships can penetrate from saltwater deep into the continent (all the way to Duluth at the west end of Lake Superior) and carry cargo without having to offload to smaller vessels. This is an immense economic benefit to reduce the cost of rehandling. Most other extensive inland waterways, such as China's canals, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, and the Mississippi north of Baton Rouge, are shallow-draft, meaning designed for barges and inland vessels. They typically only have draft of 6-9 ft. But, the Federal Navigation Project in the Detroit River has a project depth of 27 ft, which is maintained by dredging.  Therefore, much larger cargo vessels can ply the Great Lakes and carry bulk materials such as coal, iron ore, gravel, cement, corn, wheat, and bulky manufactured goods. Panamax-class container vessels cannot enter the Lakes, but lesser-draft lake and ocean vessels have passage most of the year (depending on ice cover). There have been proposals to enlarge the locks along the St. Lawrence Seaway and deepen the channels sufficiently to allow Panamax vessels to carry cargo all the way into the Lakes, but such a project would cost billions and takes decades. It is unlikely this will ever happen.

As far as I know, there are five deep-draft inland waterways in the world:

1. The St. Lawrence Seaway as far as Duluth, Minnesota
2. Congo River as far as Matadi
3. Rio Orinoco as far as the Caroní River (approx. 225 miles)
4. Rio Amazonas as far as Manaus, Brazil
5. The Yangtze in China as far as Wuhan (approx. 600 miles)

Possibly you could include the Thames, lower Mekong, and the Port of Rotterdam to this list, but I think of these as dredged river mouths rather than an improved system with locks and/or major dredging to allow ships deep into a land mass.

Third, the Detroit River is of major biological importance because its fishery resources move freely across the boundary between two nations (Canada and USA), and represent millions or billions of dollars in revenue each year to each nation.

The Detroit riverfront was formerly an industrial area of warehouses and factories, but has been converted to recreational use in the last decade or so.  It is really pleasant on a warm sunny evening to walk along the embankment and watch ships pass and people enjoy themselves.

Interesting people hang out on a summer evening.

This view shows the International Riverfront and Rivard Plaza Merry-Go-Round. The cluster of glass towers in the distance is the Renaissance Center, also known as the General Motors Renaissance Center. The four 39-story corner buildings are office towers, while the 73-story unit in the middle is the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center. With 1298 rooms, it is a large hotel on any standard.

The complex was originally conceived by Henry Ford II and other businessmen in 1970 as a way to forge a Renaissance in downtown Detroit. We think of Detroit's calamitous decay as being a recent phenomenon, but deep trouble was obvious as early as the infamous 1968 summer riots, when many blocks of tenements burned. Businesses moved out from downtown, and serious decay set in. The hotel opened in 1977, and Ford originally occupied some of the office space. 

General Motors bought the complex to use as its world headquarters in 1996 and completed a 500-million renovation in 2004. Somewhere in the towers is the now-infamous private elevator for use by top-level executives so that they could emerge from their cars in their private parking garage and get whisked up to the executive suites without having to mix with lowly GM engineers and mid-level managers. Imagine having to mix with engineers and hear technical details about your product. Even worse, marketers might tell you that your cars were not selling.

Fireworks over the river are awesome if you have access to an upper floor in the Marriott. As I recall, I was invited to a suite rented by a dredging company. Most of the guys drank, but I took photographs.

The view inland is not as interesting as the view over the river. The terrain is flat, and you see office buildings and warehouses. This area looks reasonably prosperous and is well-policed because of the tourist trade - you have to drive inland and north to see the blocks with burned-out homes and empty lots reverting to prairie.

Just a few blocks to the west is Greektown, a block of restaurants and stores with a Greek theme. As I recall, downtown Detroit used to be a food desert, but in Greektown, you could get a good meal and finish off the evening with a pastry - or two - or three.

I took these photographs with my Fujifilm F31fd compact digital camera. 

Clay Street Collapse - the Remnants

Long-term readers may remember that in 2011, I summarized the sordid story of how the late-1800s commercial building at 515 Clay Street, Vicksburg, collapsed in January of 2006. Fortunately, no one was killed, but a car was squashed. Thereafter, the City of Vicksburg and the owners of the building fought in court for years about whether they could demolish the remains, and Clay street was partially blocked for months with a pile of bricks. It was a comedy of errors.

Well, eight years later, the street is clear, but there is still debris in the old lot. This is a view looking north across the lot.

This is the view from Clay Street looking east to the site where 515 Clay once stood. The building in the back is the Adolph Rose Building.

This is a portion of the basement that survived.

This is the view east along Clay Street from the newly renovated 1903-vintage First National Bank building. Some very nice apartments, known as The Lofts, have opened there and will offer high-end downtown residences. It is nice to see the downtown revitalized.  The Adolph Rose building, in the center left, lost a big section of brick wall when no. 515 collapsed (see the first figure). The light-colored section of bricks shows the repaired section. As another example of revitalization, the old Strand Theater in the basement of the Rose has reopened. The Strand, operated by Westside Theater Foundation, offers independent international films. I wrote about the Strand in a 2011 article. Folks, support your downtown businesses and merchants!

Aug. 24, 2014 update: here is a post card from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. It is an undated view of Clay Street with the Adolph Rose building in the center of the block, behind the trolley car.

A Pocket of Hope in Detroit, the Heidelberg Project

Detroit, Michigan, This once-great industrial city is situated on the Detroit River and was the birthplace of the American automobile industry. It was also the industrial powerhouse that turned out vast amounts of munitions, airplanes, and military vehicles that helped us win World War II. But since the 1960s, it has also become an infamous example of urban decay taken to such an extreme extent, it boggles the mind. This was not a war zone, like Stalingrad in 1942; it was self-imposed decay caused by decades of racial strife, corruption, incompetence, theft, greed, and stupidity. Are there any more terms we can apply? Several former mayors were jailed for corruption. As of 2014, the city is in bankruptcy. But there are pockets of hope. One of these is the Heidelberg Project, a neighborhood of art projects that attracts tourists and shows that something creative can be extracted from the mess. The Project even has a web page.

Walk around, and you see houses covered with teddy bears, signs, balls, puffy things, and bits of plumbing. Even the street has dots. Some of the houses are occupied; some are only used during the day for classes or projects.

If you want, you can also have little lions, ducks, dragons, and monkeys.

Stop to look at the details. There are plenty of non-subtle comments on the American consumer society, the gun mystique, poisonous foods, and legal drugs.

The famous buried Hummer. These people really, really did not like Hummers. Or maybe they liked them because they were such an extreme example of modern American consumer society and its cult of self-gratification via gross material possessions.

The pink bicycle is just in front of the pink Hummer.

Unfortunately, all you need to do is walk a block or two to either side of Heidelberg, and you see stark evidence of what has befallen much of Detroit: abandoned houses, fields, tatty signs, and closed stores.

Not all is well even here. Arson is cheap entertainment in Detroit, and even the Heidelberg Project was not immune. From their web page:

Just before 3:00AM on March 7th, the colorful Party Animal House (a favorite of children) located on Mt. Elliot (between Heidelberg and Elba Streets) was destroyed by arson, the 9th fire over an 11-month period. Though DFD responded within five minutes of the first call, their focus quickly shifted from the already destroyed Art Installation, to protecting the adjacent home of longtime residents. Though the neighboring structure suffered significant water and fire damage, its residents were unharmed and remain in surprisingly good spirits. This is the ninth fire set at the internationally renowned art environment since May, 2013, when The Obstruction of Justice house was first set ablaze.

Another essay on the arson at the Heidelberg is from David Uberti.

We will look at more Detroit photographs in future articles. Click for photographs of the International Waterfront. Heidelberg photographs were taken in 2010 with an Olympus E-330 digital camera and the Olympus 14-54mm lens. I reprocessed the RAW files with PhotoNinja software.

Update June 6, 2017: Some powerful black and white film photographs from south Detroit:
https://www.35mmc.com/04/06/2017/35mm-large-format-detroit/