E & F Street and Beacon Drive
Author: Joan Momsen
 
Book Description
As mentioned in the other volumes, this is not a history book, although it is published by the Josephine County Historical Society. It is a book of just current photographs. The JCHS is a non-governmental nonprofit corporation and we get most of our operational funds from the generosity of the community through donations, membership and bequeaths. We continually have to come up with ways to raise money so we can collect and preserve the history of Josephine County. One way is what you see here. Publication of books about the history, and in this case the future history, of the area is one way we raise operations funds.
The idea of just taking photos of the way Grants Pass looked in 2014 came about because in other publications, I observed that the society does not have photos of all the old buildings when they were first constructed. Hopefully, in decades from now, this series of little publications will give insight and photos of what this town looked like in 2014. It may also give local owners of buildings the impetus to give us their old photos of their buildings instead of just filing them or throwing them out.
Although this is the 5th volume of The Streets of Grants Pass, it has the longest time span of whhen the photos were taken. Most were taken in March 2014, but a few were taken in December 2014 .Of the first five books printed, this is the only one that has photos taken by others than the author. Jesse Van Cleave and Severin Burri used two different cameras to take many of the photos. The photos taken with the GoPro camera give a different perspective of some of the buildings.
Remember this is just a picture book of the buldings of 2014. E and F Streets to the Parkway were original streets. But not very commerical for years before they were extended East to connect with the I-5 Freeway in the 1960s. So some of the buildings have been there for decades and were built toward the end of the streets. Now they are surrounded by newer buildings. Maybe some of these older buildings have childhood memories for those who used to explore the streets that ended in a dead end.