This Week’s Various

Love the dog mansion, Alabama.  The Cubix is also pretty great.

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There is a *great* set of pics of the Kildare mansion (on the National Register) in Huntsville here from when it was for sale; if you ever thought of photographing since it’s been purchased, consider your willingness to be in the public right-of-way and get water hosed, hit with a rock, followed by a truck, yelled at, or simply blinded by a light from an upstairs window.  How very, very strange.

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The NYT ran their own piece about Kathryn Tucker Windham.

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I somehow missed this article from Time Magazine back in April on Thornton Dial “Art is strange-looking stuff”; there was this from an April Time Mag blog.

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A couple of weeks ago, I tie-dyed around 30 shirts for the boys’ daytime summer camp.  Whew (instructions here if you’re interested in trying it).  On the way out of Pottery Barn this week, a PB Teens catalog had a tie-dye comforter on the cover, so the next time I find a nice but boring white comforter cover I might try tie-dying it.   In the neighborhood: three of the *cutest* beach balls we got at PB Kids for Shug’s upcoming birthday pool party.

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FoodandWine.com purchased rights to publish my pic of a koolickle for their piece on state fair foods.  Curiously, this was a koolickle I had in Mississippi; had no idea that koolickles had ‘migrated’ up to North Carolina.

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Beautiful home in Andalusia, AL:

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A little over a year ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation released its list of the “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” and the Threefoot Building in Meridian was on it, due to threat of demolition.  Last month, it looked worse than ever:

(this was a pic I took a few years ago that shows the beautiful detailing)

On the Trust website:

In 1930, the citizens of Meridian, Mississippi, had never seen anything like the newly dedicated Threefoot Building, a shiny, 16-story Art Deco skyscraper that was the tallest building in the state.

Named for its owners, a successful German-American family in Meridian, the building was admired for its decorative polychrome terra cotta and granite exterior and lavish interior details, including marble flooring and wainscoting, cast-plaster walls and ceilings, and etched bronze elevator doors. Although the Threefoot family lost their prized property in the Depression, the building was a mainstay of downtown Meridian for decades until it closed in 2000 because of deterioration and extensive upper-floor vacancies. Hopes were buoyed when the building’s owner, the City of Meridian, began negotiations with a developer who planned to renovate the building and turn it into a hotel, but the City later abandoned that plan.

Late last year, the MDAH made possible a $150k grant for a seismic study on the foundation and ground of the Threefoot building.