Faux homes help new light rail infrastructure blend in D.C. suburbs

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Possible Purple Line substation house. MTA photo.

Possible Purple Line substation house. MTA photo.

The Purple Line is a proposed 16-mile light rail corridor. Once completed, it will link suburban communities north of the nation’s capital in Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. First proposed more than a decade ago, state officials breathed new life into the project in 2007 to connect Metro transit stations in New Carrolton and Bethesda as well as the business districts between the two communities.

Planning for the project, including engineering and environmental studies, are underway. Construction could begin as early as 2015 if funding is secured.

Purple Line route. MTA map.

Purple Line route. MTA map.

The Purple Line will require multiple support structures and buildings, including 18 power substations, 14 signal bungalows (small buildings with radio and signal equipment), and a nine-story ventilation tower in Bethesda’s central business district. Residents who live along the proposed alignment told the Washington Post that they are concerned about potential impacts from the power facilities known as traction power substations. Continue reading →

Columbia Heights reborn

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The riots that tore through Washington, D.C., after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 left many neighborhoods physically and emotionally scarred for decades. Columbia Heights was one of the most adversely affected. Continue reading →

Orthodox desire lines

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Suburbia is inherently automobile oriented.  It is a cultural landscape dominated by strip malls, subdivisions, and clogged transportation corridors that demands deference to cars. The people who moved to the suburbs brought with them cultural traditions that included a wide array of religious beliefs. As ranch houses and more immodest dwellings sprouted in residential neighborhoods after the Second World War, churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship were built for the people who lived in them.

Suburban intersection, Dunwood, Ga., near an Orthodox synagogue.

Suburban intersection, Dunwoody, Ga., near an Orthodox synagogue.

Orthodox Jews, like their Reform, Conservative, and non-Jewish neighbors, rely on cars to survive in suburbia. Trips to the grocery store, to work, to school, to summer baseball games, and to the mall all require getting in a car to make the trip. Unlike their neighbors, however, Orthodox Jews must hang up their car keys for the weekly Sabbath and for other high holy days because of religious laws prohibiting certain activities that include work, carrying objects, pushing and pulling things, and operating vehicles. Continue reading →

Jesse James in Iowa

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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.

Jesse James Historical Site, Adair, Iowa.

Continue reading →

Separate and unequal: Preserving Jim Crow

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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 →

New life for old interviews: Some Atlanta music & journalism history

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Eric King and Joel (J.T. Speed) Murphy at the Blind Willie's bar, Oct. 24, 1990. Photo by author.

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 →

Another reason I love Atlanta’s Beltline

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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

Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, Washington

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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:

 

Old Julia and Elwood

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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.

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.

Continue reading →

Atlanta Beltline bridges (Eastside Trail)

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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.

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© 2013 D.S. Rotenstein