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.

• Roll Call of Landmarks Lost to Katrina

  By ELMalvaney on August 23, 2009 • ( 5 )

  

  This coming Saturday will be the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s destructive rage across Mississippi’s Coast. In the spirit of the newspaper clipping re-printed here for the Camille anniversary, I’ll begin this week of remembrance with a listing of Mississippi’s… Read More ›

• MissPres News Roundup 8-21-2009

  By ELMalvaney on August 21, 2009 • ( 2 )

  

  The official song for this week’s News Roundup is . . . “Cocacabana.” Begin humming as we whirl around the state of MS: The Summer 2009 issue of “The Wellspring” (scroll to page 5) gives a nice update on the progress… Read More ›

• Abandoned Mississippi: Yazoo County Agricultural High School

  By ELMalvaney on August 20, 2009 • ( 31 )

  

  In 1912 the Yazoo County Agricultural High School was located at Benton, and it is one of the largest and best of its kind in the state. [A] few years later a Consolidated High School was located here, graveled roads… Read More ›

• Oh yeah? Well our Capitol has electric lights!

  By ELMalvaney on August 19, 2009 • ( 4 )

  

  I saw this postcard on eBay (which I usually try to avoid in order to flee temptation) and had to buy it because it seemed a little spooky (it’s actually a little darker in real life). When I got the… Read More ›

• SAH Civil Rights Memorial Study Tour

  By ELMalvaney on August 18, 2009 • ( 1 )

  

  The Society of Architectural Historians has recently announced an intriguing tour of Civil Rights memorials in Georgia and Alabama, October 8-12, 2009. According to the SAH website, the four-day tour will begin in Atlanta, visiting Auburn Avenue and the Atlanta… Read More ›

• Remembering Hurricane Camille

  By ELMalvaney on August 17, 2009 • ( 4 )

  

  From the Biloxi Daily Herald, “Landmarks Lost During Camille,” by Emily Germanis, August 16, 1970: “Historically speaking, the Mississippi Gulf Coast received a great blow as a result of Hurricane Camille. At least 15 well known landmarks were wiped out, others… Read More ›

• A few bloggy changes

  By ELMalvaney on August 16, 2009 • ( 5 )

  I’ve been told unequivocally that “Change is Bad.” However, I’ve been a busy little beaver this weekend adding a few gadgets (or widgets as we bloggers call them) to Preservation in Mississippi. First, you’ll notice over at the top right… Read More ›

• MissPres News Roundup 8-14-09

  By ELMalvaney on August 14, 2009 • ( 4 )

  

  Well, what’s been going on this week around our fair state? Before we begin, let me just put this fact out there: August is my least favorite month, so I’m liable to be especially cranky and hard-to-please, so bear with… Read More ›

• The International Style: Conformity, not Individualism

  By ELMalvaney on August 14, 2009 • ( 0 )

  

  You have reached the end of a four-part series about The International Style by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. If you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. ———————————————————— Way back… Read More ›

• The International Style: Regularity, not Symmetry

  By ELMalvaney on August 13, 2009 • ( 10 )

  

  Since I spend a good part of my life writing and reading descriptions of buildings, I naturally love symmetrical buildings. It’s so easy and simple to describe, say a Georgian Revival building, even a big building: center entrance with transom… Read More ›

• The International Style: Volume, not Mass

  By ELMalvaney on August 12, 2009 • ( 0 )

  

  For me, the last concept to click about Hitchcock and Johnson’s definition of the International style was the subject of the very first chapter, “A First Principle: Architecture as Volume.”

• Book Quotes: The International Style

  By ELMalvaney on August 11, 2009 • ( 3 )

  

  It’s been a while since we did a book quote series, and since the three earlier series included a diatribe against Modern planning principles (Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of the Great American Cities), a polemic against Modern architectural design (Tom Wolfe’s… Read More ›

• An Architectural Bonanza in the Clarion-Ledger

  By ELMalvaney on August 10, 2009 • ( 4 )

  

  Was I in heaven this weekend? Was it a dream? I think there were not one, not two, but three really informative articles about architecture in the Clarion-Ledger. I know I usually leave such things to Friday’s News Roundup, but… Read More ›

• Yankee Stadium Update

  By ELMalvaney on August 9, 2009 • ( 0 )

  There’s an interesting follow-up by Paul Goldberger on the future of old Yankee Stadium in this week’s New Yorker, in which the debate appears to be whether to save one gate or not. These guys don’t deserve Yankee Stadium anymore–may… Read More ›

• MissPres News Roundup 8-7-2009

  By ELMalvaney on August 7, 2009 • ( 4 )

  Well, get out your event calendars, Ladies and Gentlemen, because we’ve got a lot of ’em coming up announced in the last week or two: August 25, 2009 will find you sitting impatiently in front of the television, with your antenna… Read More ›

• Lost Mississippi: Benton Elementary School

  By ELMalvaney on August 6, 2009 • ( 2 )

  

  You may remember from Monday’s post “Mississipp’s Outstanding Post-War Schools” that the elementary school at Benton in Yazoo County was included in a list of Mississippi’s best school buildings constructed between 1945 and 1951.  I also noted that this particular building was no… Read More ›

• Back from Lexington

  By ELMalvaney on August 5, 2009 • ( 2 )

  

  In yesterday’s post, we drove up Hwy 17 and got into Lexington where we saw the courthouse, the jail, the hospital, and the old stagecoach inn. Today we’ll complete our whirlwind tour by heading out from the square and looking at… Read More ›

• To Lexington (Miss.) and Back

  By ELMalvaney on August 4, 2009 • ( 7 )

  

  Well, I haven’t done a “To . . . and Back” posting of late, mainly because when summer really comes in, I usually don’t get much farther (or is it “further”?) than my front porch–anything else just takes too much… Read More ›

• Mississippi’s Outstanding Post-War Schools

  By ELMalvaney on August 3, 2009 • ( 4 )

  

  It’s totally normal (I’m sure you would agree) to collect books like American School and University, and as I was flipping through the 1950-51 (22nd annual) edition, I came across a chapter called “America’s Outstanding School Buildings (built since 1945).”… Read More ›

• Visitor Centers-Bah!

  By ELMalvaney on August 2, 2009 • ( 2 )

  For your Sunday afternoon reading pleasure, and in light of my recent musings on the National Park Service and on the fate of heritage sites, may I suggest this article from Architectural Record’s March 2009 issue, “Rolling out the unwelcome mat for… Read More ›

• MissPres News Roundup 7-31-2009

  By ELMalvaney on July 31, 2009 • ( 2 )

  

  Can you believe it’s almost August? After our horrible hot dry June, July has flown by with beautiful rain, coolish nights, and not-very-hot days. This is my kind of summer! This week has been very eventful, and in a good… Read More ›

• National Register and Other Simple Tools

  By ELMalvaney on July 30, 2009 • ( 0 )

  

  As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the value of the non-flashy National Register, I wanted to mention how struck I was with the book Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks and its emphasis on the importance of simple… Read More ›

• In Defense of the National Register

  By ELMalvaney on July 29, 2009 • ( 0 )

  

  I planned to write this particular post when I first started this blog, way back in the Dark Ages of February, but for some reason, I’ve only just now gotten around to it. I felt the need to defend the… Read More ›

• Campus Research Resources

  By ELMalvaney on July 28, 2009 • ( 0 )

  Last week, our crack researcher Carunzel, referenced the “CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP)” in a reply to Day 3 of the contest, Woodworth Chapel at Tougaloo College. It reminded me of that website, which I am now including in the… Read More ›

• Old Newspaper Clippings: Saving the Madison County Courthouse

  By ELMalvaney on July 27, 2009 • ( 0 )

  A group of dedicated researchers in Canton has put together a notebook of newspaper clippings and other primary source materials titled “Madison County History Preserved,” and I was fortunate enough to have a colleague show it to me. Glancing through it,… Read More ›

• A Little Tidbit About the South Delta Housing Authority

  By ELMalvaney on July 25, 2009 • ( 1 )

  Here’s an interesting little article I saw yesterday in the Clarion-Ledger about a lawsuit against the South Delta Regional Housing Authority: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009907240344. As you might recall from Shame of the South Delta Regional Housing Authority”, the SDRHA demolished the National Register-listed… Read More ›

• Final Standings for July09 Name This Place

  By ELMalvaney on July 24, 2009 • ( 5 )

  As I’m sure you all knew because you woke up early this morning to check, doakley won this month’s contest with a wild guess that just happened to be correct. With that daily victory, doakley also set a record for most wins… Read More ›