Author Archives

In addition to ruling over the MissPres universe with an iron fist, Malvaney enjoys reading, wandering around old buildings, stopping to smell the magnolias, fiddling with databases, and sitting on the porch with a good book and a big ol' dog. Non-interests include but are not limited to tweeting, texting, Instagramming, planking, Candy Crush, Donald Trump, and unecessarily destructive home renovation shows.

• Name This Place 9.1.2

  By ELMalvaney on April 9, 2012 • ( 15 )

  

• Name This Place IX: The Doors Edition

  By ELMalvaney on April 9, 2012 • ( 0 )

  It’s been a long while since our last Name This Place contest, since last July when JRGordon took over, to be exact. For those of you who are new around these parts, Name This Places contests are usually a week-long festival… Read More ›

• Name This Place 9.1.1

  By ELMalvaney on April 9, 2012 • ( 7 )

  

• Happy Easter

  By ELMalvaney on April 8, 2012 • ( 5 )

  

• Cleveland’s Grover Hotel Goes Condo

  By ELMalvaney on April 5, 2012 • ( 8 )

  

  Visitors to downtown Cleveland in the past decade or so might have noticed the small town’s lone “skyscraper,” the old five-story Grover Hotel, standing vacant. The Grover and its minimal Mission style has been a fixture in Cleveland’s skyline since… Read More ›

• Bailey School Tan and Clean

  By ELMalvaney on April 4, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  If you’ve had occasion to drive down North State Street in Jackson in the past month you might have noticed that Bailey Junior High School (now Bailey Magnet School) is looking more tan than it has in recent years. For… Read More ›

• Mississippi Unbuilt: 1897 New Capitol

  By ELMalvaney on April 3, 2012 • ( 5 )

  

  Back in the 1890s, as we’ve shown in articles and other comments from the period, Mississippi’s capitol, now known as the Old Capitol, was in serious disrepair and considered structurally unsound. Senators dithered about whether to vacate the building for… Read More ›

• Lamar County Courthouse Update

  By ELMalvaney on April 2, 2012 • ( 3 )

  The Purvis-based blog “Ramblings of the Diva” has been following the progress of the Lamar County Courthouse renovation project. Check out her updates: Lamar County Courthouse Part I, Lamar County Courthouse, Part 2, Lamar County Courthouse, Part III

• Stepping on Meridian in Itta Bena

  By ELMalvaney on March 30, 2012 • ( 7 )

  

  Maybe you remember the post from last year, “Stepping on Jackson, MS in NOLA” where I showed evidence of Jackson’s Harper Foundry in New Orleans in the form of utility covers on the sidewalk. I’ve continued to make a habit… Read More ›

• Round the Blogosphere 3-29-2012

  By ELMalvaney on March 29, 2012 • ( 0 )

  

  Time for a rare almost mid-week, not-quite Friday roundup of interesting blog posts. Our Mississippi bloggers have been taking advantage of the nice weather lately to get out and peek into corners and out of the way places, and I… Read More ›

• Abandoned Mississippi: Vicksburg’s Mercy Hospital

  By ELMalvaney on March 28, 2012 • ( 103 )

  

  Standing on a two-block parcel on a high hill overlooking Grove Street, the old Mercy Hospital’s blue tile front wall still beckons drivers off of the busy Clay Street thoroughfare. But the massive building is no longer a hive of… Read More ›

• Before and After: Meridian’s Merrehope

  By ELMalvaney on March 22, 2012 • ( 7 )

  

  Most of us know of Meridian’s National Register-listed museum house Merrehope. Today’s Before and After is actually an After and Before, showing what Merrehope looked like in the 1880s and before the major renovation and additions of the turn of… Read More ›

• Yazoo City’s Delta National Bank and Its Place in American Architectural History

  By ELMalvaney on March 21, 2012 • ( 9 )

  

  A while back I stumbled onto a website called “Defining Downtown at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the Bank Building & Equipment Corporation of America.” A part of the Recent Past Network, the site aims to bring attention to the thousands… Read More ›

• Vicksburg NMP: Other Monuments Worth Stopping For

  By ELMalvaney on March 16, 2012 • ( 4 )

  

  Well, we’ve come the end of our week-long tour through Vicksburg National Military Park. If you’ve missed the earlier posts, you might want to start at the beginning. Seeing the 101: Vicksburg National Military Park People Monuments, or “Pardon me,… Read More ›

• Vicksburg NMP: Small But Interesting Ohio Monuments

  By ELMalvaney on March 15, 2012 • ( 4 )

  

  Since I was so wordy yesterday, today I’ll let the pictures do the talking. While the other states mostly erected a single large monument commemorating their soldiers’ sacrifices, Ohio chose a different route. According to the Park website, Rather than erect… Read More ›

• Warren Port Commission Moves Again to Destroy Ceres

  By ELMalvaney on March 14, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  According to Alan Huffman’s blog, the Warren County Port Commission is on the warpath again in its ongoing quest to demolish the main house at Ceres Plantation. Read all about it here. Ceres Plantation, a rare surviving example of a… Read More ›

• Vicksburg NMP: Mississippi’s Monuments

  By ELMalvaney on March 14, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  Apart from the large “person” monuments we looked at yesterday, the monuments that really catch the eye at Vicksburg National Military Park are the state memorials. The Park’s website lists the monuments, separated by which side of the war they… Read More ›

• Vicksburg NMP: People Monuments, or “Pardon Me, General Grant!”

  By ELMalvaney on March 13, 2012 • ( 12 )

  

  Continuing in our week-long series of travels and observations in Vicksburg National Military Park . . . The vast majority of the people-centered monuments in the Vicksburg National Military Park are simple busts or bas reliefs of various important military… Read More ›

• Seeing the 101: Vicksburg National Military Park

  By ELMalvaney on March 12, 2012 • ( 7 )

  

  Spring is here and it’s time to head out to see the world, or at least a little slice of Mississippi before the heat of summer comes in and crushes you. On that note, a couple weeks ago, just before… Read More ›

• Water Valley Makes NYT

  By ELMalvaney on March 10, 2012 • ( 7 )

  Congratulations to Water Valley, whose downtown revitalization and preservation efforts have made the New York Times, in “They Made Main Street Their Own: How Four Women Revived a Derelict Mississippi Town.”

• Architect Harry North Austin: Never a Half-Way Man

  By ELMalvaney on March 8, 2012 • ( 1 )

  

  A while ago, I ran a post in the Pictures Series about Jackson architect Harry North Austin. Thanks to a beautiful photograph preserved and passed down through one of his daughters and shared with us by granddaughter Olis Billings, we… Read More ›

• Abandoned: Vaughan, Mississippi

  By ELMalvaney on March 7, 2012 • ( 163 )

  

  Recently I decided to take the Vaughan exit off I-55 to see how this little hamlet was doing. It’s been a while since I was through, maybe 2004 or 2005, but even then it seemed like things were slipping away…. Read More ›

• Walt Grayson recognizes Poplar Hill

  By ELMalvaney on March 6, 2012 • ( 3 )

  

  Congratulations to the folks at Poplar Hill School in Jefferson County, one of our 101 Mississippi Places to See Before You Die, for a nice story on Walt Grayson’s Looking Around Mississippi. Aired on Friday, March 2, the story interviews alumni… Read More ›

• Seeing the MissPres 101 Places and Asking Questions

  By ELMalvaney on March 2, 2012 • ( 1 )

  

  Tom Freeland at the North Mississippi Commentor has jumped on the road to his old haunts in southwest Mississippi to see a good chunk of the sites on the recently published 101 Mississippi Places to See Before You Die. So on… Read More ›

• 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . Count the Holes in the Hinds County Armory Roof!

  By ELMalvaney on March 1, 2012 • ( 13 )

  

  You may recall a post from long ago called “Hinds County Armory Shamefully Neglected.” If you weren’t around then, this is a bit of what I said: Those of you who have visited the Mississippi State Fair might have noticed… Read More ›

• Mississippi Architect, June 1964: Gilfoy School of Nursing

  By ELMalvaney on February 29, 2012 • ( 1 )

  

  The featured building in Mississippi Architect’s June 1964 issue was the Gilfoy Nursing School at Baptist Hospital in Jackson. In last week’s post about the endangered Rexall Drug Store on North State Street across from Baptist, I noted that the… Read More ›

• Mississippi Architect, June 1964: Who’s Building Is It?

  By ELMalvaney on February 28, 2012 • ( 1 )

  In the June 1964 issue of the Mississippi Architect, editor Edward F. Neal picks up a similar theme to his editorial of May 1964, “The Language Barrier,” noting the disconnect between architects and their clients. In this issue, he re-prints… Read More ›