Midtown House Blend

This post was written by architect Chris Myers, who led our team in the Midtown House Blend project.
Midtown is an area of Jackson that lies just north of downtown with borders defined by Fortification Street, Woodrow Wilson Avenue, Mill Street, and West Street. It was incorporated in the early 1900s and remained a prominent middle-class neighborhood until Jackson’s population decline in the 1980s. Over the past 15 years several organizations have sprung up to revitalize the area through rebuilding houses, training residents, and encouraging business development. Midtown Partners is one of those organizations, and one of the industries they are striving to develop is the creative economy.

The availability of inexpensive warehouse space in Midtown has played a large part in its attraction of artists and creatives. Currently, the area is home to several creative entities including Pearl River Glass Studio (a 30+ year resident), Davaine Lighting, Beanfruit Coffee, and Studio2Concrete, to name a few.

Additionally, in 2012, Midtown became home to Jackson’s version of Figment, an annual free participatory arts festival. Since Figment’s 2007 inception in New York, the festival has spread to numerous cities around the world. Jackson was its third location and our iteration of the event will take place again during October of 2014.

To raise funds for the upcoming festival, Midtown Partners and Figment put out a call to participate in House Blend, a project to revitalize Midtown properties. The purpose of the community project was to work on abandoned houses. Participants were tasked with painting the houses’ plywood-covered windows in order to improve their overall appearance while helping them blend into their surroundings. The projects spans two weeks, March 1-15, and participants will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite design.

With a team of 17, CDFL took on the property at 149 Millsaps Avenue. In design meetings we discussed a full gamut of options ranging from Banksy-style graffiti and giant alligators to realistic window treatments. In the end, we went the route of blending in and painted white frames on the black plywood, cleaned up the front yard, added plantings at the front porch, and removed a mostly-dead tree trunk.

Thanks to hard work and beautiful spring weather, the CDFL team was able to complete our house in two weekends and one week ahead of schedule. We’re so appreciative of Midtown Partners’ work in our community and look forward to working with them on more projects in the future.