Rhode Frog: Another Mill Goes Down

No fire this time, just a good old fashioned demolition. This is to make way for the new middle school.

But I'm more interested on the house behind this mill. It sits at 134 Hamlet Ave, across from Consumer's Propane, a tiny cottage with a slate roof, broken windows, and probably few ghosts.

I'm assuming (hoping) it's classified as historic, and they leave it, instead of knocking it down with the mill. There's nothing else like it in the city, and to me it's beautiful. I haven't started any research yet, but if anyone knows anything about it (other than whose cousin's friend's brother knocked out a few windows and got high in the kitchen), I'd love to hear it.

To see more photos (any good gas men watching from Consumer's must think I'm a nut or a terrorist. But come on - the gate was open), see my flickr box.

And if you venture there, wear sneakers and don't touch any greenery - there must be three kinds of poison leaves. And the broken beer bottles - not cool, people.

(Update) After a bit of online reading, I'm 90% sure that the house shown and a similar but larger building around the corner will remain:

[Planned director Joel] Mathews said that the two historic buildings will be used to house the alternative learning center for middle school students... The other building would be used to house the media technology coordinator.
The city is soliciting a federal grant for $1.9 million to renovate the historic buildings.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Another Mill Goes Down

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