Showing posts with label National Youth Administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Youth Administration. Show all posts

Monday, February 4, 2019

Return to the NYA Gymnasium, Edwards, Mississippi

NYA gymnasium, Fuji X-E1 digital file, 14mm Fujinon lens.
Kodak BW400CN film, Leica M2 camera, 50mm Summicron (Type 4) lens.
The National Youth Administration (NYA) gymnasium, formerly part of the Edwards High School, is continuing to deteriorate. The roof is beginning to fail, and in this climate, you know what that portends. I have photographed here before, but the building interests me, so I returned a couple of times in 2018 with different cameras. My friend, Suzassippi, provides some history of the gymnasium in her 2016 article in Preservation Mississippi.
Panatomic-X film, Hasselblad 501CM camera, 50mm Distagon lens.
The big old gymnasium smells wet. Part of the roof lets light through.
Panatomic-X film, Hasselblad 501CM camera, 50mm Distagon lens.
The rooms in the rear, including the former shower room, is open to the sky. I took this photograph by placing the Hasselblad on a ledge and stopping the lens down to f/11 or f/16.
Kodak Ektar 25 film (expired), Rolleiflex 3.5E camera, 75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens.
Black and white is great for these old buildings, but the infamous institutional green is worthy of recording for posterity. This grotesque green was (is still) found in thousands (millions?) of institutions around the United States. Yuck. The photograph above is from a roll of Kodak Ektar 25 that I bought on eBay. It was long-expired and almost ruined, but I managed to save part of the roll. Sadly, Ektar 25 is no more.

Friday, March 25, 2016

Another Rural Gymnasium: Edwards, Mississippi

On January 26, 2016, Suzassippi wrote about Rural Gymnasiums in the Preservation Mississippi blog. Here is another example to add to the list.
This gymnasium is at the corner of Magnolia Street and old US 80 in the town of Edwards. From what I can tell, the building has been closed for years, but it has been secured. All doors were locked.
I was not familiar with the National Youth Administration. The Mississippi department of Archives and History has a web page with photographs of NYA projects. They were lucky to complete this building in 1941 because once the World War II started, much civilian construction was interrupted or cancelled. According  to Preservation Mississippi, the gymnasium was designed by architect James Manly Spain in the Art Moderne style.

Photographs taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica M2 rangefinder camera and 50mm f/2.0 Summicron lens. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i scanner using Silverfast Ai software and resized with ACDSee Pro.

Update May 31, 2016: The interesting blog, Preservation Mississippi wrote a more detailed description of the gymnasium.