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Our winter holiday celebrations always include viewing Joan Crawford's Christmas Eve visit with a radio reporter. (both the real recording, and the scene from Mommie Dearest) Joan's children are doing their best not to twitch or even BREATHE, as they sit on the tasteful colonial davenport with their saintly mother. The reporter gushes-on about the "lovely Colonial fireplace", and other lovely Colonial things in her lovely Colonial mansion (which had been Spanish, until William Haines re-did the place for her). Back then, if something wasn't Colonial, it was just not respectable for decent people.
Colonial Circle was similarly lovely: indolently curving around the periphery of Jackson's Colonial Country Club - a golf club for social also-rans for whom the Country Club of Jackson was inaccessible. Joan would have approved of the tasteful 1940s Colonial clapboard homes on Colonial Circle. But I have to wonder what Joan would have done, had the bridge at one end of her circle been abandoned by the city, while a tree collapsed at the street's other end. https://www.wapt.com/article/tree-fa...osure/40242516
One suspects that Saint Joan of Brentwood, would have grabbed her Axe, after donning a sequined evening gown - going at that tree in her usual "Christinaaaaaaaaaaa bring me the AAAAAAAAXE" spirit for which she was famous. (I'd link to that scene, but YouTube, in the sidebar, is running an ad for buxom elderly prostitutes one might want to "date". Why their AI thinks this sort of thing is of interest to Joan Crawford fans, I have no idea. Or maybe that's what people on Jackson's Colonial Circle are into, these days... I've about had it with YouTube, at this point.)
But truly, don't these people have chainsaws? Don't they have rose shears? Don't they have handsaws? Don't they know someone on the other side of the tree, who DOES have those things? Following those recurring car crashes on once-lovely Colonial Circle, one would think people would be prepared to to handle whatever came their way: https://www.wlbt.com/2021/03/23/afte...ngerous-curve/
Can't rep you for your charming story so here's a thumbs up instead.
(Perhaps the McKenzies downed the tree to keep more cars from coming to the neighborhood and parking in their living room)
Can't rep you for your charming story so here's a thumbs up instead.
(Perhaps the McKenzies downed the tree to keep more cars from coming to the neighborhood and parking in their living room)
Could you believe that footage? Thank you for actually viewing the posted video! The nighttime shot, showing the living room - through the giant hole in the brick exterior wall - was the best. How many times did the house get hit, before the TV station decided to pay a visit (at which point, still another HEADLESS-CHICKEN-ON-WHEELS crashed into the TV Camera Van?) Five times? More? Maybe they lost count?
But really, this story should have been picked-up by the Daily Mail.
Plenty other stories about Jackson driving HAVE made it to London's Daily Mail, though. Here, a woman was live-streaming her singing talents, on her cell phone, while driving down the Interstate (not far from lovely Colonial Circle) with her window open. Big mistake: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...i-freeway.html And, from the comments "The sad thing is that her boyfriend, (name redacted by Gloria), was shot and killed in February of this year when he was fighting with another guy over a different woman." Poor Ashlee! If that two-timin', no-count man had just been faithful, I bet Ashlee wouldn't have felt the need to live-stream and get herself out-there on Facebook, to find a replacement for him.
Here, on the same Jackson Interstate, a drunken Yolanda bumps a jeep, and sends it hurtling off an overpass, killing a father and son from Illinois (just traveling THROUGH Jackson, is getting dicey), who had managed to be the sole survivors of a murderous mumsy's killing spree: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...daughters.html
That sort of crash, is precisely why Mississippians feel the need for gargantuan conveyances: the biggest trucks, and the biggest SUVs they can find: in order to prevail against other vehicles, during random crashes.
Which leads me to what Izzi said, when she read this thread's original post: "Hell, Gloria! Why didn't somebody just grab a rope, tie it to the trailer hitch of one of those big, stupid, fancy trucks everybody's got, tie the other end to the tree trunk, and just PULL the damn tree out of the way?" Izzi, one of my original friends from my first college, still lives in Eastover - THE power neighborhood of the state. Her (unsellable for what she's got in it) mult-million-Dollar/multi-acre estate is roughly equidistant from the Billionaire Blacktop Baron, the Fedex Founder, and the guy whose banks and goldmines bought him a Martha's Vineyard property which he rented to then-prez Obama.
DH and I were recruited to that neighborhood, when we were bright young things whose penthouse had made it into some minor regional publications. As Model Minorities, we were in demand. Some bankers gave us an inside deal on a big, ugly foreclosure - knowing I had a great decorator, who'd turn the overgrown ranch house into something fab. Eastover was the nucleus of a now-long-gone time and place, called "Fashionable Northeast Jackson". Colonial Circle was on the periphery of that world - once upon a time. Eastover people, instead of the mingy and polite little 'Colonial Country Club', preferred the '50s Moderne brashness of 'The Country Club of Jackson'(https://www.city-data.com/forum/jack...raid-66-a.html), (so, dear Sheena, the CCoJ was more 'grand' than 'genteel'. Apart from Brookhaven - and maybe Laurel, I can't imagine a town in Mississippi, whose Country Club could have been genuinely genteel.
....all this being vaguely germane to my assertion that I am very familiar with Colonial Circle. The two "main drags" of Fashionable Northeast Jackson, were Ridgewood Road and Old Canton Road. The city is laid-out all higgledy-piggledy, illustrating the locals' historic inability to coordinate efforts or make long-range plans. The layout of the Jackson Metro is worse than that of Minneapolis, even. Meandering Colonial Circle was the shortest path between Ridgewood and Old Canton Road. I took that path, many times. So did everyone I knew. I barely remember that "sharp curve". I never had trouble. Nobody I knew, ever had any trouble. Loubertha, our kids' driver/bodyguard, says that curve was nothing. And she was usually in a time-crunch, getting the kids from Beth Israel to Saint Andrews- whizzing around in that big old 500SEL, while the kids compounded inflation in their heads, memorized cube roots from flash cards, or repeated phrases from foreign language tapes. Why can Jacksonians no longer make that curve?What has changed?
I do miss the glory days of FNEJ, even though no uses that term anymore.
The story about the jeep that got pushed off the overpass, got a little complicated, but I do vaguely remember it.
Have we gotten so hapless as a society that we can't even move a tree blocking the street? After Katrina, good old boys out on their own were all over the southern half of the state cutting trees for free!
I do miss the glory days of FNEJ, even though no uses that term anymore.
The story about the jeep that got pushed off the overpass, got a little complicated, but I do vaguely remember it.
Have we gotten so hapless as a society that we can't even move a tree blocking the street? After Katrina, good old boys out on their own were all over the southern half of the state cutting trees for free!
You're so right! The NEW term is 'FFNEJ' (Formerly Fashionable Northeast Jackson).
FNEJ is now "Madison", everything from the Renaissance to Flora.
That said, I kind of dig the new identity evolving in FFNEJ. The Belhaven/Fondren/Eastover area is slowly evolving from a conservative area for families into a place that borders on, or aspires to be, urbane.
It's still Mississippi in every way, yes, but on relative terms FFNEJ is effectively becoming an extension of "Downtown". Moving into FFNEJ is for urban pioneers. Given that this shift is occurring in some form or fashion, however glacially, in FNEJ, Earth's most Conservative place, somehow I find endearing and in some way hopeful.
FNEJ is now "Madison", everything from the Renaissance to Flora.
That said, I kind of dig the new identity evolving in FFNEJ. The Belhaven/Fondren/Eastover area is slowly evolving from a conservative area for families into a place that borders on, or aspires to be, urbane.
It's still Mississippi in every way, yes, but on relative terms FFNEJ is effectively becoming an extension of "Downtown". Moving into FFNEJ is for urban pioneers. Given that this shift is occurring in some form or fashion, however glacially, in FNEJ, Earth's most Conservative place, somehow I find endearing and in some way hopeful.
A realtor who knows the realtor who soft-sold our final Madison home, told us that The Oracle of Madison(a transcendent publicist/author/crafter-of-narratives & thousand-Dollar-an-hour arbiter/ predictor/ultradesigner/wellspring of design trends/confidant-of-billionaires: one of many astonishing people hiding behind high hedges, in the gold-plated lifeboat that is Madison) helped tweak, for an FFNEJ socialite friend, the listing description of that socialite's home in Leftover (or 'Lowdown-hoe' or 'Lo-ho', or whatever that district has been officially renamed). The buzzwords: "Eastover-adjacent", "estate lot", and "Midcentury Modern" were added, and BOOM! ....a prominent Mississippi artist was making an offer, within the week (this, on a house which had been languishing, unsold, for years).
So, you're right: the winds have shifted, and a new vocabulary was needed. A different demographic is responding to different ideas.
But I'm not remembering any particular conservatism in FNEJ. We knew it was there - somewhere - but we didn't really know any of those people. I remember, when we first arrived, a locally-big developer's coming back from some talk at 1B (First Baptist), delivered by a guest speaker who was telling them that Proctor & Gamble was "of-the-Devil, because there's a crescent moon in their logo!!!". But this developer had studied under an actual Guru/cult-leader, as an actual Hippie in an actual Hippie commune, somewhere - where he had learned to be an effective con-man. His Christian schtick was just a schtick - and 1B was just a hunting ground for him. He and his anything-but-Conservative wife, later, moved up the religion ladder, to a more fashionable congregation, in a more elite sect, peopled by richer marks with whom to "share investment opportunities". And their house, done in a groundbreaking South-of-France style, was in the magazines, at the time. A "Conservative" house would have been Williamsburg Georgian.
Then, there was the scion of a prominent Carpetbagger/Gold Coast/Mayflower-Cafe-type family (the crowd we called "Mayflower Descendants"), who awakened, in the middle of the night, to find his wife and her new friends, encircling his bed, chanting some incantation of their Zerubbabel-centered cult. (He didn't stick around, to find out what they were going to do, next...)
As for those who lived in "Correct Williamsburg Homes", furnished with "Licensed Williamsburg Reproduction" stuff, there was, in the Seventies/early Eighties, the banking heiress and her husband, who had their own personal hunky "protege". The three would go out dancing, at FNEJ's Gay bar, just as New York socialites were doing, at the time. Several owners later, our "maid" (ex-military guard/driver for the children) picked their old Mercedes SEL, for schlepping our kids around town. I guess we owned a piece of FNEJ history, for a while.
Then, I suppose it was in the very-early-Eighties, there was the steel heiress, whose beautiful fancyman, in his off-hours, loved to take the Silver Shadow she'd bought for him, out to "Pocahantas" (on a highway on the West side of the metro, somewhere), where he liked to service truckers. I'll never forget, while I was still in school, our taking the road which goes over an ancient bridge, running between the southern end of Downtown, and what I'd later come to discover had been the "Gold Coast" (Jackson Jambalaya: The Gold Coast of Rankin County). There was a landfill operation going, on one side of the highway, where the wreckage of a Silver Shadow, half-buried, was sticking out of the dirt. This was very exciting, to little me - I'd only seen RRs in Town & Country, at that point - and so I mentioned it - getting the whole story, about the fancyman, and the local lawman's son (who'd bragged about getting serviced "By some guy in a Rolls Royce"), and the gang of baseball-bat-swinging bubbas who encircled that poor Rolls Royce, with the fancyman inside - beating the Silver Shadow into oblivion, and beating the fancyman into a vegetative state.
The heiress' steelworks are in that vicinity, and I assume she owned the land under that now-developed part of the Gold Coast Swamp. Considering that her family (of Gold Coast origins?) were recycling the scrap metal of the entire metro, the burial of the Rolls can only have happened as a memorial to the fancyman. Otherwise, it would have been processed as scrap metal (unless RR experts are right, and postwar British steel is so inferior, not even recyclers will touch it). Conservative?
And remember the stories of that guy at The Barrington (https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1...ycQpx96BAhiEAg), who was corrupting the Jacuzzi with his girlfriends and their improprieties - who kept a tacky stretch limmy at the Barrington, and conducted VERY improper swinger parties in said limmy, en-route between FNEJ and New Orleans?
Remember the drop-dead-studly bodybuilder doc and his wife, with a Crane Park villa, who had all sorts of legendary activities going on, there? There were no curtains on their big, round bathroom window, and he was quite frank in saying he was only proud to be on display. Who can blame him? The guy.... was.... TARZAN. (everybody else's villa had painstakingly-shirred round silk window treatments, from "THE" best workroom... as specified by "Mr. Westerfield", who was THE Decorator) "Everybody else", included a former top politician who'd come out as Gay, and a multimillionaire heavy implement dealer (also Gay) who'd schooled me, whom he saw as "The Next Evelyn Gandy" (definitely supplementing my MBA training) in backroom deals and the real machinations which make the world go round.
Seemed to me, that everyone in Fashionable Northeast Jackson was competing, to see how outlandishly worldly and downright-sinful they could become. There was some weaponized Conservatism and morality, for sure: but mostly, it was DEPLOYED, at critical times (divorces, trials, elections), rather than actually lived.
Our particular crowd, and the milieu within which we moved, while being studiedly amoral, were PRUDENT. 'Prudent', apparently, is not the same thing as 'Conservative'. None of us had fried anything, in their entire lives. We used steamers. We used Cuisinarts. We cooked Nouvelle Cuisine. We had silk upholstery, and fine paintings, which smoky cooking might ruin. Everybody worked-out. Drinking was NOT something we tolerated. Nor was smoking. Nor was drugging. We approved of nude beaches. We approved of swinging, and admired those who actually found the time to indulge in that(But who had time, when we were building businesses, buying investment properties, obsessing over our interiors, obsessing over our clothes...our gardens...our cars, and the enhancement of our children's educations?) We, and most people we knew, were new arrivals in Jackson - people from various parts of the state, who'd become too much "above our rearing" to belong back-home... wherever back-home was.
Oh! And here's great news about Colonial Circle. The City of Jackson has acted pitiful-enough, and so now Mississippi Department of Transportation is giving them some (or all?) of a hundred-million-Dollar pot of money, to fix that bridge!!!! https://www.wlbt.com/2022/07/20/mdot...bridge-repair/
Last edited by GrandviewGloria; 07-30-2022 at 06:38 PM..
The City of Jackson has acted pitiful-enough, and so now Mississippi Department of Transportation is giving them some (or all?) of a hundred-million-Dollar pot of money, to fix that bridge!!!! https://www.wlbt.com/2022/07/20/mdot...bridge-repair/
Is there a bridge in that picture? I don't see one. But I don't think it'll take $100M to rebuild it.
UPDATE! Colonial Falls! Joan Crawford's lovely Colonial home could have used one of these
Quote:
Originally Posted by RocketDawg
Is there a bridge in that picture? I don't see one. But I don't think it'll take $100M to rebuild it.
It's under those weeds - the brown ones, sprayed with herbicide, which will only get greyer and uglier, as the years tick-by. This, by Jackson standards, constitutes "roadway maintenance": conversion of pretty, green, oxygen-producing/carbon-binding weeds, into ugly grey-brown dead ones.
But truly, you should have more faith in Jackson's leaders. If anyone can run-up a hundred-million-Dollar bill for a bridge over a ditch, then Jackson can. I believe! I believe! You should believe, too.
But on to today's update: video of Colonial Falls, upstream, a bit, from 'The Bridge Over Purple Creek', to which you allude, dear RocketDawg. Jackson Jambalaya: See Colonial Falls in NE Jackson One should always read the comments below those articles: many offer insight.
Purple Creek was merely a ditch, until a four-foot water pipe burst, several years back. Suddenly, it was fed by the cascade shown in the video. The rocks are a nice touch - surely added by the hapless buyer of the now-defunct Colonial Country Club, in order to prevent any further erosion of the land. Already, the flow has gouged a "swimming-pool-sized" hole in the landscape.
The Owner of the land, has repeatedly reported that leak to the City - over the several years since the leak became apparent. You can see how much attention the City paid to those repeated reports.
Once Purple Creek began to be fed by those billions of gallons of water, it turned into a real creek. Maybe 'The Bridge Over Purple Creek' was not designed for such a flow of water, day-in/day-out, for years. Surely, it was designed for only what was foreseen and expected: carrying rainwater runoff to the Pearl River. Nobody anticipated billions of gallons of CHLORINATED tap water. Chlorine degrades metals. Metals are probably components of the bridge, which I presume to be of steel-reinforced concrete. But that's just my own theory.
On the bright side, just imagine what all that chlorine has done for the ecosystem of the Pearl River. By now, it ought to have eliminated that pesky endangered River Sturgeon, https://www.google.com/search?q=Pear...h=607&dpr=1.71 particularly, once one considers the tens of millions of gallons of "Raw Boo Boo" which Jackson has leaked into the Pearl. Jackson Jambalaya: Jackson Dumps Over 21 Million Gallons of Raw Sewage into Town Creek One has to wonder if those poor sturgeons are even capable of producing roe, with all that Birth Control Pill residue flowing downstream. Billions of gallons of chlorinated water, would add plenty of spice to that mix.
My granddaughters add that, "...chlorine and organic compounds form Organochlorines, which recombine, eventually, to form Dioxins, which accumulate in the fatty tissues of vertebrates." But they're only 8 years old, so what do they know? I think they've been playing with their Aunt Bitsi's electron microscope, a bit too much. Oh, well, it distracts them from playing 'Murder Hospital' with the kids of the foreign oligarchs in the duplex/triplex 'Trophy Penthouses' looming above our humble floor-thru simplex. The game involves the (pretend) murder of patients, through protocols mandated as "Standard of Care", then harvesting and selling their organs. They have fun texting little "auctions", and arranging "news blackouts" and redefining words in dictionaries, then (play-like) compelling world governing bodies to abide-by those new definitions. So, truly, I'm not sure whether the girls consider those Pearl River dioxins to be a good thing or a bad thing. For all I know, their playmates are proud of their nation's having extincted its own great river's unique River Dolphins and River Sturgeons.
Germane to the subject-at-hand, would be this other Jackson Jambalaya article about the leak, and its coverage in The New York Times: Jackson Jambalaya: Unbelievable. Well, Maybe Not. The comments below the article, give updates on the progress of the bridge repair(or lack, thereof).
But back to our own Saint Joan of Brentwood, her lovely Colonial Home by Decorator Billy Haines, and once-lovely Colonial Circle: what could be more lovely and Colonial, than a waterfall cascading down a rocky slope, toward a creek?
The comments below the video are very good. Anonymous said, "One risk is would readers find credible that such a Marxist Madman Mayor with inept underlings exist in modern society." California has one such madman holding the office of governor. Lumumba pales in comparison.
Chlorine is a chemical weapon when used in large amounts. In fish, small amounts will sear the gills. I'm surprised that sturgeon are able to survive. Suffocating in the boo boo and chlorine. I wonder what it's doing to the water fowl.
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But I don't think it'll take $100M to rebuild it.
UPDATE! Colonial Falls! Joan Crawford's lovely Colonial home could have used one of these
