Jesse James (1847-1882) was a nineteenth century outlaw who became a popular figure in American folk legend and folk song. By the twentieth century, film and television joined the earlier oral and print traditions with fictional and documentary renditions of James’s life.
Jesse James Historical Site, Adair, Iowa.
Equalization schools were the South’s futile attempt to cling to Jim Crow segregation. They were built throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and other Deep South states as a last ditch effort to forestall court-ordered public school integration. According to Georgia architectural historian Steven Moffson, his state had the greatest number of schools built to preserve the separate but equal doctrine that ultimately was dismantled under the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
Decatur’s Beacon Elementary and Trinity High schools were among the hundreds of equalization schools built in Georgia after World War II. They were constructed in 1955 and 1956 on the site where the city had maintained its African American school, the Herring Street School, since the early twentieth century. In early 2013, three years after receiving a $10,000 historic preservation grant that should have led to the property’s protection, the City of Decatur began demolishing parts of the two schools to build a new police headquarters and civic plaza. Continue reading
Eric King (front) and Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the Blind Willie’s bar, Oct. 24, 1990. My recorder is on the bar. Photo by author.
Earlier this year I began taking steps towards completing a project that had its origins back in 1990. For a few hours the evening of October 24, 1990, Eric King and I consumed a fair amount of alcohol and talked blues music and history at the bar of his Atlanta club, Blind Willie’s. At the time, I wrote a blues column for a short-lived alt-weekly, Footnotes. I had been spending lots of time in Willie’s and I had wanted to interview King for background material for future stories. Continue reading
Shot this morning on my ride on Atlanta’s Beltline Trail. What a great way to start the day.
Postscript: After this post went live I learned that this is Bon Jovi’s second brush with fame. He was pictured in a Feb. 14, 2013 New York Times article on the Beltline.
Now Atlanta Is Turning Old Tracks Green. The New York Times, February 14, 2013.
© 2013 D.S. Rotenstein
The Washington, D.C., Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) office has begun posting excerpts from the oral history interviews I did for them between 2007 and 2009. The first excerpt posted is from my summer 2007 interview with Washington Parks and People executive director Steve Coleman.
My interview with Coleman covered a lot of territory. The clip posted at the DC LISC Website focuses on the rehabilitation of Washington’s Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park). Surf on over to the page or listen to the clip here:
Well, the name of it is Old Julia still. I guess you hard of that. — M.R., March 1988.
Former turpentine camp site, St. Johns County, Fla.
“Old Julia” was the name of a turpentine still and camp that operated in rural St. Johns County, Fla., in the 1920s and 1930s. And then, like other temporary naval stores processing sites in the Coastal Plain flatwoods, its owner moved the buildings and people to another stand of longleaf pines to extract resin for distillation into turpentine.
The Atlanta Beltline folks have done an outstanding job transforming an abandoned rail corridor into an urban amenity. The East Side Trail‘s corridor retains a fair amount of its industrial and commercial landscape legibility. In addition to the rehabilitated brick buildings that punctuate its length, there is the landmark former Sears and Roebuck building and a couple of surviving railroad bridges.
These Instragram shots are eye candy for the industrial history enthusiast.
© 2013 D.S. Rotenstein
Over the past three years this site has changed platforms once and servers twice. It also has gone through some growing pains, false starts, and wrong turns. When I migrated the blog from WordPress.com there were some formatting errors that occurred in the earlier telecommunications history posts (embedded media not rendering correctly, etc.). Also, because of changes in Google Maps plugins over time, some of the embedded maps in older posts were broken.
After a couple of weeks of repair work, all of the graphics and other embedded media in the Western Union microwave network series appear to have been restored. The site has a new brick background —Catskill brick pavers from Savannah, Ga. — and better optimized photos. Gone are many of the posts that detoured from the site’s purpose: telling stories about the past. They diminished the site’s integrity and were a distraction from what I set out to achieve with this site.
New posts on the way cover recent past resources in the Washington suburbs and some fun ways to combine music with oral history. Future posts will be shorter and mainly will provide introductions and complementary information for blog posts and articles published elsewhere in edited sites, like the recent piece on a Southern poet’s home, and e-journals.
DSR
Tom King and several other preservation colleagues drafted a letter to Sally Jewell, the new Secretary of the Interior. The letter asks Secretary Jewell to revamp the federal historic preservation process:
We urge you to conduct a full review of the national historic preservation program with the aim of bringing it back to the intent of its founders, as that intent relates to the imperatives of the twenty-first century. We would be pleased to do whatever we can to assist in such an enterprise.
Tom asked me to sign the letter along with other practicing heritage preservation professionals and a batch of students poised to begin their careers in a regulatory system that has gone astray from its founding principles. The letter is embedded below. Continue reading
Since 1970, the State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices have received up to $46.9 million in annual matching grants through the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) to assist in expanding and accelerating their historic preservation activities.
Funding is used to pay part of the costs of staff salaries, surveys, comprehensive preservation studies, National Register nominations, educational materials, as well as architectural plans, historic structure reports, and engineering studies necessary to preserve historic properties.
The All HPF-assisted activities must meet standards set by the Secretary of the Interior, and at least 10 percent of the allocations to the States are subgranted to assist Certified Local Governments for locally based activities. — National Park Service
In 2010 Decatur, Ga., received a $10,000 Historic Preservation Fund grant for historic preservation-related planning studies at the city’s former equalization schools, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High. The previous year, the City’s historic preservation consultants completed a citywide comprehensive historic resources survey and failed to mention the African American historic site (the survey did, however, include an inventory form for a building at 109 Waters Street with this note: “Number on building is 420 W Trinity, the police station”).