Showing posts with label Cherry Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cherry Street. Show all posts

Monday, August 8, 2022

The Wide View in Vicksburg, Dec. 2021 (Hasselblad XPan 05)

Corner of Monroe and China Streets, Vicksburg, MS (30mm ƒ/5.6 lens, center filter, ƒ/8.0½)

Corner of Monroe and China Streets, Vicksburg, MS (30mm ƒ/5.6 lens, center filter, ƒ/8.0½)

When my friend first loaned me his gorgeous XPan panoramic camera, I took sample photographs around Vicksburg with Kodak Tri-X 400 film. 

Over the years, the standard 45mm lens was the most common one for XPan photographers. This was already pretty wide on this format. My friend also has the amazing 30mm ƒ/5.6 lens, which has proven to be a challenge. You need textures or interesting features in the lower foreground to keep the scene from being too boring. I think the first example above is effective, but the second photograph may have too much plain foreground. Click any picture to see it at 2400 pixels wide, and all comments welcome.

Good stuff junk yard, Mt. Albans Road, Vicksburg (30mm ƒ/5.6 lens)

This is the car junk yard on Mt. Albans Road east of Vicksburg. Readers may remember older pictures from here. 

Corner store, Mt. Albans Road (45mm ƒ/4 lens, Fuji Acros film)
Gorilla pawn shop, Washington Street, Vicksburg (45mm lens, med. yellow filter) 

The 45mm ƒ/4 lens has amazing resolution across the frame.  

Cherry Street at Clay, 30mm ƒ/5.6 lens, yellow filter, ƒ/11 (Fuji Acros film)

This little store at the corner of Cherry and Clay Streets housed the Wells & LaHatte appliance business for many decades. The business has moved one block away and the little wood building is for sale. The extra wide 30mm ƒ/5.6 lens is an amazing optic, but I found it works best when stopped down to ƒ/11.

Mt. Heroden Baptist Church, 1117-1119 Clay Street (30mm ƒ/5.6 lens, yellow filter)

Standby for more panoramic scenes in Vicksburg and the surrounding area. Thank you for exploring with me.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Lost Victorian House: 2432 Cherry Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

2432 Cherry Street, Vicksburg, MS, after the fire (Fuji Acros film, Leica M2 camera) 
Damage visible from Dewitt Street
A beautiful Victorian house at 2432 Cherry Street suffered a catastrophic fire in mid-2018. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the house was grievously damaged. The house formerly belonged to my friends, Leslie and Daniel, but they had sold it a few years ago. Nevertheless, they were devastated by the news of the fire.
While biking by the house in February 2019, I saw a tractor and some men looking at the property. That meant trouble, imminent demolition. I talked to one of them, and he said it would be hopeless to rebuild the house. Too much had been burnt including most of the roof.
This image shows the elegant central hallway. The walls were plaster.
Once the demolition team began work, it was all over within 3 or 4 days. I saw them salvage some materials like iron railings and some timbers. But most of the house was reduced to a pile of crushed timber.
Some unusual ladies lived here in the past. Hmmm, I should have bought one. Regardless, slowly but surely, Vicksburg is losing its architectural heritage.

Update May 2020: I learned from a friend who lives near the lot that the owner of the house had refused to raze the wreck. The city deemed it a hazard and hired a contractor to tear it down. Now the City has a lien on the property. Vicksburg suffers from this problem on a regular basis. Jackson must be in even worse condition as per abandoned properties with liens.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Hedy Does the Vicksburg Photowalk

Hedy does not get out often. She is very cranial and usually stays home and ponders the great topics of the day. But a chance to participate on the Worldwide Photowalk was just too good to miss. And who would not want to tour the metropolis of Vicksburg on a hot muggy day in company with other photographers?
We started out at the Old Courthouse Museum at 1008 Cherry Street. The museum features Vicksburg historical exhibits, and many early 20th century photographs taken by J Mack Moore are on display. Hedy likes the Corinthian columns and the view.
Right across Cherry Street (address 1009 Cherry Street) is the Art Deco Warren County Courthouse. According to Mississippi Department of Archives and History:
The Warren County Court House, of Art Deco design, was constructed in 1940 with Havis & Havis as architects and W.J. McGee & Son as the general contractors. The rectangular three-story building features eleven bays on the first floor of the main stepped facade. Ornamental detailing includes decorative panels of floral and geometric designs, decorated parapet around the flat roof, and the decorated lintel of the window surrounds head. The verticality of this building, which is studded with relatively narrow windows of eight lights each rising vertically and one above the other on each successive floor in the central section, is emphasized by tall, rectangular panels of marble. 
Continuing north on Cherry Street near the junction with Main Street, and you are in the historic district.
Adams Street runs parallel to Cherry, but many of the houses are in rough shape. The pavement retained its brick surfacing.
This is an example, the cottage at 722 Adams. I hope someone restores it.
This is the old McIntyre Elementary School, closed for decades. The Good Shepard organization uses most of the building. It is in poor condition.
Adams Lane is perpendicular to Adams Street. It formerly was lined with shotgun shacks, but there are only 3 or 4 left. Years ago, while taking photos here, an older lady told me that she remembered when it was a vibrant African-American neighborhood. A truck would come around in the morning and the men would ride off to farms. Most of the women worked as domestics around town.
Around the corner at 1203 Openwood Street is the former Gore's Hardware. This is a well-preserved example of a late-1800s commercial building, of which Vicksburg once had hundreds. Look at the seven windows and the decorative trim along the roof line. The brick facade above the showcase windows was supported by cast iron beams, possibly brought here by barge from Pittsburgh or Toledo. Now we erect mass-produced sheet steel buildings designed to be a tax write-off in a minimum number of  years.
Mr. Gore passed away in 2014, and someone is cleaning up the stock in the former store. It was always said that he had every type of old-fashioned fitting, lock, or faucet in his storage rooms, although I was unable to buy suitable materials for my old house. Maybe the really old-fashioned fittings were used-up by the 1980s. I wonder if there is any lead paint left?
Hedy gets hungry when she passes Mamma's at 1209 Openwood Street.
Here is another interesting place on Openwood Street.
Across the street is an old filling station, now used as a repair shop (I think). The Vicksburg Art Association's Firehouse Gallery is in  the brick building to the right.
Head back to Cherry Street and head south. At 1411 Cherry is a brick building that formerly housed the Mutual Credit Union. JC's Barber Shop now uses one of the rooms. This utterly banal one-story brick commercial building occupies a lot on which the Baer House once stood, a handsome Queen Anne-style house with a turret. The house was demolished in the 1970s, the decade when Vicksburg was subjected to "urban renewal." That translated to tearing down historical architecture and replacing it with cheesy commercial buildings or parking lots (like those crappy monstrosities west of Washington Street, which usually stand essentially empty).
This is an interior view of the gorgeous Church of the Holy Trinity at 900 South Street. At the corner of South and Monroe Streets, it was designed by E.C. Jones and built in 1870. This was an experiment setting my Fuji camera at ISO 1600 and using the dynamic range function at 400 percent. I was surprised how well it handled the exposure range from dark pews to glowing windows.
Finally, time for lunch. Hedy had a sandwich at Martin's at Midtown, at 1411 Belmont Street. It was muggy and hot, and we were both tired. Hedy is too young for a cold beer.

Photographs taken during the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk, hosted here in Vicksburg by David Rorick. I used a Fuji X-E1 digital camera. These are the jpeg files taken with the Astia film emulation.

Please click the link for some views of Vicksburg in the 1990s, taken with film.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Carr School, Vicksburg, Mississippi: Part II

This is the second part of our tour of the former Carr Central High School, at 1805 Cherry Street, Vicksburg. The building has been renovated and converted into apartments, so urban spelunkers will no longer see the decay in these photographs. This time, we will explore the upper floors. Most of these photographs are from 2007, when a work crew was removing debris, floor tiles, rotted wood, and vegetation. Part I covered the lower floors (please click the link).
First off, you had to climb the debris-covered stairs. It is amazing how the paint chipped after years of heat-cool cycles. Other than a minor problem of lead dust, it would have been easy to chip down to the bare plaster.
If you walked along the main hall, you could down into the auditorium. As you can see, it was an impressive facility in its day.
A double-length classroom led off from the opposite (south) side of the hall. With south exposure, it was a cheerful room, but probably pretty hot before air-conditioning. A coworker, who was a student at Carr, told me that was the chemistry laboratory.
This was the only bottle of chemicals left.
I liked the symmetry of this corner. I was surprised that these were green boards, not genuine slate blackboards.
 A wing on the north side had a classroom with a good view.
From this wing, you could see a room way up in the roof (under the chimney). Notice the long radiators for hot-water heat. Being placed below the windows, they produce an insulating air dam.
This was the cheerful room at roof level, with windows on four sides. My friend told me this was the art classroom.
The art room was on the 4th floor and was semi-isolated from the main building. It had its own stairs and clean-up facilities.
The art class was alive with killer vines.
No wonder, the jungle was engulfing the north side of the building. This is the process of destruction described in the "Life After People" series on History Channel, which showed how nature would take over if people abruptly disappeared.
Back to the 3rd floor. Many of the rooms had suffered water damage, and trees were growing in some of them. The wood floors were laid over horizontal stringers on top of the concrete floors. Some of the oak flooring was intact, but most was ruined.
Finally, it was time to head on down via the rear fire escape. Well, maybe not - too much jungle.

If you are interested in other abandoned schools, please click the links:
Most photographs on this page were taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera.