A few nice upload photos images I found:
Hampton Springs Hotel Ruins, Florida
Image by TomSpinker
I uploaded four photos of this park. I have repeated my entire explanation on all four photos, since I doubt that many people will look at more than one of them.
In 1908 a luxury hotel was built over a natural spring. The sulfur-rich spring water was channeled through concrete pools on the ground floor of the hotel. The water was believed to have healing powers.
In 1954 the hotel burned to the ground; the hotel was not rebuilt and the property was not re-developed.
Now Taylor County has developed the location into a park. The ruins of the hotel are visible and the spring water still flows through the concrete pools.
There is a bridge over Spring Creek which leads to a short nature trail. There is potential to find some interesting wildlife here because the entire 12-mile distance sw to the Gulf of Mexico is undeveloped wetlands.
Park has no admission charge. There are restrooms and picnic tables.
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Here's the complete text of a plaque at the entrance:
HAMPTON SPRINGS HOTEL
The Hampton Springs Hotel was built in 1908 and was destroyed by fire in 1954. The hotel was world renowned for its sulphur springs and baths known for their healing and medicinal powers. The luxurious hotel boasted lush gardens with elaborate fountains by the springs, a golf course, tennis courts, stables, casino, grand ballroom, outdoor dance pavilion, and railroad depot. The nine-hole golf course was amoung the first in the region. The hotel had its own bottling plant and shipped the healing sulphur water nationwide. It also had its own power plant and the majority of the food served in the dining room was grown and raised at the hotel farm. The hotel had a private hunting and fishing lodge on Spring Creek six miles from the hotel site and an excursion boat with a covered launch. From the mid 1930s to mid 40s the hotel served as barracks for military personnel testing aircraft at Perry-Foley Airport in nearby Perry. Archaeological excavations here revealed the formation of the hotel and outbuildings.
A Florida heritage site
Sponsored by the Taylor County Board of Commissioners
and the Florida Department of State
2007
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Post card of Hampton Springs Hotel from State of Florida archives:
Post Card
State of Florida archives home page
This is located about 4 miles west of Perry, Florida. It is 0.7 miles south of US Highway 98 on County Highway 356. Take the first right after you pass the back entrance to Rocky's.
Here's a search which will give you other flickr photos of this place:
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photo taken 20 Nov 2008 about noon
p1020542
Cumulonimbus and Lionel Brett council houses, south Hatfield, Herts.
Image by Earthwatcher
Originally uploaded for the Guesswhere UK Group.
This northerly view from the back of my childhood house was taken when I was a teenager and starting to get interested in meteorology. I grew up on this council estate in south Hatfield which was built in 1956. It was designed by architect Lionel Brett (who became 4th Viscount Esher), and was innovative in that the terraced houses curved around the contours of the land in a series of sinuous crescents. They were warm and cosy and had sizeable gardens compared with modern-day council housing. The main distinctive feature was the low-angle single-pitch roof, constructed from timber overlain with aluminium cladding. Each terrace had a single modular roof extending over its entire length.
Unfortunately this design approximated to a crude aerofoil section which was spectacularly demonstrated during a severe gale on the night of 3rd-4th November 1957 when virtually all the houses facing in a westerly direction had their entire roof length lifted clean off and flung for distances of up to a 100 metres away. In this photo, the houses visible in the lower left all lost their roofs, which ended up in the gardens to the right. The houses which faced east (of which ours was fortunately one) were unaffected, as the 'leading edge' of the roof section was not facing into the wind.
I was 5 years old at the time and yet still clearly remember the screaming noise of the wind and the banging and clattering that went on. In those days, the street lighting was automatically switched off at midnight, so all this took place in pitch darkness in the early hours. In the morning when daylight came, I still remember the words of my father as he looked across the road at the houses opposite "I don't know - there's something funny about the houses across the street.... Christ, there's no bloody roofs on them!" And so it was - you could see daylight through the upstairs windows all along the street.
Altogether, over 50 houses were affected and lost their roofs. In those days hardly anyone had a telephone in the house; there was a long queue of people outside the callbox at the end of the street, waiting to phone the council. Amazingly, there were no fatalities and, as far as is known, not even any injuries - quite remarkable when you consider that great sheets of aluminium must have been flying around during the night - could have had your head off in no time.
The subsequent investigation and public enquiry found that in some cases the roofs had not been adequately fixed to the house walls. In the months that followed, repairs were made and structural improvements involving additional strong steel fixing brackets were installed.
The photo was taken 10 years after the event and there is no sign of what had occurred. I continued to live in the house until 1973 and there was never any further storm damage during that time. But to this day I still get jittery during gales.
Sorry about the wonky photo - I didn't hold the camera very straight when I took this, and to have cropped it after straightening would have entailed losing too much picture area.
Taken with an old Kodak bellows camera on 120 roll film and scanned from a print.
See where this picture was taken. [?]
