This House Must Die: Documenting a Decatur Teardown

Posted on by
2

The greenest building is … one that is already built – Carl Elefante, architect.

The house at 916 East Lake Drive in Decatur, Georgia, had to come down. It wasn’t structurally deficient. Nor was it an abandoned eyesore. The one-story home suffered from a malady sweeping through Decatur: it was too small. Once celebrated by architects and consumers, the American small house is an endangered species threatened by the impulse to tear them down and replace them with larger, “better” homes.

New construction looms over Oakhurst’s small houses. October 2011.

Continue reading →

David “Honeyboy” Edwards, 1915-2011

Posted on by
Reply

I heard the news this morning that blueser David “Honeyboy” Edwards has died at age 96. I first interviewed Edwards in 1991 in Atlanta. Like all music writers who interviewed (over-interviewed) Edwards, I asked him about the night Robert Johnson died. Continue reading →

Clandestine Cold War Presidential Emergency Site: Fort Reno Redux

Posted on by
Reply

Last year I wrote an article for the Recent Past Preservation Network’s newsletter documenting presidential emergency facilities. These were subterranean bunkers with above-ground radio towers. Follow-up articles appeared in this blog.

Recent Internet posts have revealed the existence of photographs taken by the John F. Kennedy administration during the construction of the site in Washington, D.C., code-named “Cartwheel.” The site, with its masonry communications tower, is “hidden” among water towers in the capital’s Tenleytown neighborhood. The photos have been digitized and are available at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Website.

According to the information included with the digitized images, the Fort Reno facility was constructed in the summer of 1961 and it was sponsored by the White House Army Signal Agency (WHASA). The images below are a few of the nearly 100 images from the JFK library’s collection.

Capoeira Maculelê Decatur

Posted on by
Reply

Originally published on Dateline:Decatur, a post on a local capoeira group. Kick back and watch this video compiled from the three clips embedded in the 2011 post.

© 2011 David S. Rotenstein

Historic Parkwood: An Early DeKalb County Ranch House

Posted on by
1

Parkwood was one of the last subdivisions developed in Historic Druid Hills. The first post in this series explored how Parkwood’s landscape developed between c. 1920 and 1960. The research presented in that introduction shows that there were three periods of historic development inside Parkwood: 1927-1939; 1940-1947; and 1948-1952.

Houses built in the earliest phase were executed in the period revival and bungalow styles popular at the time; homes built in the middle phase bridged the revival styles and included early ranch houses; and, the homes built in 1948 and afterwards were almost exclusively ranch houses. This post explores the history of one of the earliest ranch houses constructed in Parkwood during the middle phase, in 1946. Continue reading →

The Civil War, George Washington, and the Mount Vernon Factory

Posted on by
1

Shortly after the first Union defeat at Bull Run in July of 1861, federal authorities confiscated James Crutchett’s Capitol Hill property in Washington, D.C. Just a few blocks north of the Capitol, the property occupied much of Square 683, which is bounded by North Capitol Street, C Street, D Street, and Delaware Avenue. It included Crutchett’s home and a factory where he had begun turning out George Washington kitsch made from wood he was harvesting from Mount Vernon. Continue reading →

Jefferson County, West Virginia, Civil War Memories

Posted on by
Reply

In 1994 I worked on a cultural resource management regulatory compliance project that cut through a large portion of Jefferson County, West Virginia, south of Harpers Ferry. I interviewed several older residents about the historic buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural landscapes in the project area. Continue reading →

Druid Hills is Ranch House Ground Zero

Posted on by
Reply

Originally published in the Summer 2011 issue of the Druid Hills News.

Continue reading →

Civil War Lost and Found: Lincoln’s First Inaugural Ballroom

Posted on by
Reply

Dance card. Library of Congress image.

Abraham Lincoln began his first term as the 16th president of the United States in a ceremony held on the Capitol’s east portico. About 25,000 people watched as Lincoln was sworn in Monday March 4, 1861. Lincoln left the Capitol and went to the White House, traveling in a carriage down Pennsylvania Avenue under tight security. Later that evening, the new president and his wife left the executive mansion for the traditional inaugural ball.

Many of the sites associated with Lincoln’s inauguration were permanent buildings: The Capitol; Willard’s Hotel (where the Lincolns stayed before the ceremonies); Pennsylvania Avenue; and, the White House. One piece of pop-up architecture that did not survive beyond the spring of 1861 was the ballroom where the Lincolns and their guests danced into the night of March 4, 1861. Continue reading →

Montgomery County Planning Board Ends Preservationists’ Bid to Designate Silver Spring Church

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday the Montgomery County Planning Board held a session to evaluate whether it should forward a draft amendment to the Master Plan for Historic Preservation that would have designated the First Baptist Church of Silver Spring as historic.

By unanimous consensus, the Planning Board elected to not have a draft amendment prepared, effectively killing the proposal to designate the church. The Planning Board deferred to the 6-2 vote by the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission that the property met none of the nine legal criteria for designation.

I wrote briefly about the local preservationists who pursued the designation in an earlier post and I plan a follow-up post on the many issues raised by this case. In the meantime, the testimony I submitted to the Planning Board is reprinted below. The local newspaper, the Montgomery Gazette, reported on the Planning Board’s decision in a post published at its Web site overnight. Continue reading →