Blog Roundup 7-26-2010

I think the blog roundup will become a regular feature, not every week but enough to start designating it with a date like the news roundups. I hope these links help pull together lots of good blog posts you might find interesting and broaden all of our horizons a bit.

• As you might recall from the last Blog Roundup, the National Trust’s blog recently had a provocative post called “How to turn young adults into preservationists.” Kaitlin over at Preservation in Pink, a young preservationist herself, took umbrage at the concept that young people need to be “turned into” preservationists–read her thoughts at “A Response to ‘How to Turn Young Adults into Preservationists’.”
• Blake Wintory at Lakeport Plantation in Arkansas takes a trip across the river occasionally and shares his recent visit to the Burrus House, also called Hollywood Plantation, in “Lakeport Explores the Delta: Hollywood Plantation, Benoit, MS.” The house was placed on the Mississippi Heritage Trust’s 10 Most Endangered Places list in 2001 but is now towards the end of a major renovation by the Winn family, descendants of the original owners.
• Robert Walker’s Southern Faces, Southern Places always features beautiful photography of this place we call Mississippi. I particularly enjoyed his recent “Church Hill, Mississippi” where he captures this place in the same spirit that Eudora Welty did back in the 1930s, except with another 80 years of patina and now in full color.
• There’s a new blog that covers the Louisiana/Mississippi region called A Southerly Flow and it’s kind of a travelogue of interesting trips. Recent postings take us to “Routh Cemetery, Natchez,” “Margaret’s Grocery and Bible Class, Vicksburg,” and the is-there-isn’t-there-a-cannonball “Rodney, Mississippi–Presbyterian Church.”
• Architectural Research, blogging from Tulane’s Southeastern Architectural Archive, posts about Samuel and William Wiener’s trip to Venice in “Venice Sojourn 1927.” As you may recall, the brothers, known for their very early International style buildings in Shreveport designed a couple of houses in Jackson for family members, including the William Wiener house in Woodland Hills, listed on the National Register last year and on the SESAH tour last fall.
• For those of us interested in historic schools and ensuring they survive into the future, the National Trust’s blog has an interesting post “Reflections on Modernizing and Expanding a Historic School,” about Washington DC’s former Grant School, now known as the much more hip and trendy School Without Walls Senior High School.
• Speaking of historic schools, the DOCOMOMO_NOLA blog, devoted to the Modernist architecture of the Gulf Coast region, posts about sustainability and Modern schools, specifically the highly endangered Phillis Wheatley School in New Orleans in “Intelligent Design with Principles of Sustainability and Modernism in Mind.”
• And in a similar vein, Preservation in the Present, the blog of the Preservation Resource Center, highlights “New Orleans’ Modern Heritage,” addressing the same issues I think all us who want to preserve (good) Modern architecture are facing.
• Back in Mississippi, the fairly new WEST JACKSON blog posted about the COFO building on Lynch Street, a beehive of activity during the Civil Rights period, and Westland Plaza, one of the largest 1950s shopping centers in the state. My only complaint is that they don’t give enough time for me to answer their trivia questions before they answer it themselves–I could totally win the contest if I realized the question had been posted!
• And last but not least, not blogs but two interesting short videos:
  • the first from CNN about the blues in Clarksdale and the tourism it brings in
  • the second a 1989 newsclip about A. Hays Town and his hand-drawn Christmas cards.