For nearly 90 years, the Southern Funeral Home was a fixture on South Grand just north of Holly Hills Boulevard -- a Spanish Revival building in a city more inclined to Victorians and the Beaux-Arts. But by 2015, the building had been vacant for five years, and the city's Preservation Review Board
gave its permission to a developer seeking demolition.
Photographer
Katie Long has been fascinated by the building ever since moving nearby eight years ago. When a friend who works for
Refab got the owner's permission to access the building recently, he invited Long to come along. The images she captured show the place in all its eerie splendor, a tribute to a place that bore witness to many deaths and was bravely facing its own.
"I absolutely love my job photographing beautiful and elegant weddings, but it was so amazing to snoop inside that abandoned funeral home and photograph something not so conventionally beautiful and kind of creepy," Long explains. "I realize something had to be done and the community doesn't want to live next to an abandoned building. It’s just such a shame that a place listed on the National Register of Historic Places that was still structurally sound is allowed to be demolished and no one had any interest in rehabbing it." She offered to share her photos with the
RFT to immortalize the building's beauty one last time.
For nearly 90 years, the Southern Funeral Home was a fixture on South Grand just north of Holly Hills Boulevard -- a Spanish Revival building in a city more inclined to Victorians and the Beaux-Arts. But by 2015, the building had been vacant for five years, and the city's Preservation Review Board gave its permission to a developer seeking demolition.
Photographer Katie Long has been fascinated by the building ever since moving nearby eight years ago. When a friend who works for Refab got the owner's permission to access the building recently, he invited Long to come along. The images she captured show the place in all its eerie splendor, a tribute to a place that bore witness to many deaths and was bravely facing its own.
"I absolutely love my job photographing beautiful and elegant weddings, but it was so amazing to snoop inside that abandoned funeral home and photograph something not so conventionally beautiful and kind of creepy," Long explains. "I realize something had to be done and the community doesn't want to live next to an abandoned building. It’s just such a shame that a place listed on the National Register of Historic Places that was still structurally sound is allowed to be demolished and no one had any interest in rehabbing it." She offered to share her photos with the RFT to immortalize the building's beauty one last time.
Photos by Katie Long
