I’ve often admired this little brick commercial building on Old Canton Road in Jackson, just south of Highland Village for its use of traditional motifs like the brick veneer, columned gallery, pilastered door surround, and other thoughtful details in what is clearly a 1960s or 1970s building.
I notice from this picture that the formal name of Belzoni’s great burger and malt shop is “The Varsity Restaurant,” but like all icons, it’s real name is simply “The Varsity.”
If you haven’t already, please read today’s important post regarding the recent MDAH Board of Trustees meeting. With several posts on the topic it may not be a surprise that I am a fan of satellite and aerial photography. I’ve… Read More ›
In my email inbox I received the weekly email from Architectural Record. I was intrigued with this weeks email because almost all of the articles had a preservation slant. While none of them directly relate to Mississippi, I thought they… Read More ›
In honor of the one and only 12-12-12 day any of us will ever see (unless we can get that Youth Serum working so we all live to be incredibly old and wise yet fit and trim, making all the… Read More ›
Back in June JR Gordon reported on the rehabilitation of the White Pillars restaurant in Biloxi. Since the restaurant has been closed since the early 1990’s my interest was piqued and I went by for a look. Work has been… Read More ›
I’m not sure what architectural style the old Jackson Hilton, built sometime in the 1970s (?) on North State Street would have been called, but all of its style–whatever it was–is gone gone gone today in its current incarnation as… Read More ›
The October 1964 edition of the Mississippi Architect features an industrial building in Corinth, designed by John L. Turner.
If you’re looking for a break from the Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy coverage tonight, check out ESPN’s “Ghosts of Ole Miss” about the 1962 football season in the midst of violence over integration: “In the fall of 1962, James Meredith walked onto… Read More ›
You probably read with horror, as I did a couple of weeks ago–in fact, I think my co-workers heard a long anguished “NOOOOOOO!!!” from my office–that a car smashed into the Malt Shop in Natchez, destroying pretty much the whole… Read More ›
I haven’t done a Before-and-After in a while, but one of yesterday’s masonry screens came from the old Admiral Benbow Inn (now Admiral Retirement Center) and reminded me I had an old postcard from its glory days of colorful panels… Read More ›
The new Moss Point Municipal Building, designed by H.F. Fountain of Biloxi was the subject of the September 1964 issue of Mississippi Architect magazine. Unfortunately, this building’s life was cut short by Hurricane Katrina, as I believe it flooded like… Read More ›
Pascagoula, better known for its colonial-period Old Spanish Fort (aka De le Pointe-Krebs House), actually has some really interesting mid-20th-century buildings for the architectural explorer to examine. The commercial strip on Delmas Avenue in particular, although partially covered as a downtown “mall” as part of an urban renewal scheme in the 1970s, still has a few nicely done Modernist storefronts.
The August 1964 issue of the Mississippi Architect magazine features a building type that I hadn’t even noticed on the landscape until Thomas Rossell started pointing it out to me: the motor bank, better known to us today as the… Read More ›
In his editorial for August 1964, Mississippi Architect editor and Jackson architect Bob Henry calls architects to public service. If you know an architect, odds are, he or she is serving on a board of some kind, whether public or… Read More ›
Time for another MissPres Architectural Word of the Week. As we move right along through the alphabet, you can check out our past words here. Have you been keeping an eye out for these elements like I have? While only… Read More ›
I can be pretty bold about taking pictures of historic buildings or just any building that I consider architecturally impressive, but one place I’ve never even tried to take a picture of is the inside of my bank, Trustmark Bank… Read More ›
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 ›
This week we are following Architectural Photographer Joseph Molitor on the 58th anniversary of his 1954 trip. Today is the last day of our three-blog-postings trip through Mississippi with Mr. Molitor. According to Columbia University’s Avery Library Archive, by Thursday… Read More ›
This week we are following Architectural Photographer Joseph Molitor on the 58th anniversary of his 1954 trip to Mississippi. Molitor’s collection of photos, now at the Columbia University Avery Library in New York, forms an important documentary of what the… Read More ›
You may remember about this time last year, how we followed the 1952 footsteps of architectural photographer Joseph Molitor on the 59th anniversary of his first professional trip through Mississippi. As a reminder, here’s a little background about Molitor from the… Read More ›
Happy Monday! Here’s the latest preservation news from around the state: We’ll start on the Coast where 33rd Avenue School in Gulfport is back in the news. If you remember from a couple of posts last summer (here and here),… Read More ›
Today is technically the third anniversary of Preservation in Mississippi, but due to my own mistaken impression on the first year’s anniversary that February 9 was the big day, tomorrow will actually be the “Observed” date. In the meantime, as you’ll… Read More ›
JRGordon first reported on the city of Biloxi’s blighted property list back in an early November round-up. The list is starting to generate either repairs or demolitions as reported recently by the Sun Herald. While most buildings on the list… Read More ›
A while back, reader Gary E. Magee commented on an old post about Jackson architect Tom Biggs that one of Bigg’s designs, the chapel at St. Dominic hospital, is slated for demolition in a planned expansion of the adjacent emergency area…. Read More ›
Although not really a new concept in the preservation world, the interest in preserving ranch houses and other mid-century buildings caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal in “Plain, Common . . . and Historic?.”
The Sun Herald has a positive report on the efforts of the 33rd Avenue High School Alumni Association and MDAH to restore the once segregated Gulfport high school.
Preservation in Mississippi 