Jackson Rooming House - A Jim Crow Era Boarding House in the South

The Digital Heritage and Humanities Center at the University of South Florida (USF) Libraries, working in collaboration with the Tampa Bay History Center, used a suite of reality capture and laser scanning and imaging technologies to document the deteriorating Jackson Rooming House in Tampa, Florida. The project was undertaken in an effort to capture the as-built construction and extant features of the home in an effort to digitally preserve this imperiled site. Resultant datasets will be used in a planned museum exhibition at the Tampa Bay History Center, featuring Virtual Reality and immersive exhibit design applications that will center on Tampa's history and the Jim Crow Era. The Jackson Rooming House is a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) listed home provided shelter and refuge for African American travelers during the Jim Crow segregation era. Also known as the Jackson House,it was constructed in 1901 in the downtown area of the City of Tampa, Florida. During the home's height of use, several prominent musicians and entertainers were known to have stayed there, including Count Basie, Cab Calloway, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ray Charles. The site sits near the once thriving black business district in Tampa, along Central Avenue, that was home to numerous nightclubs in the 1960s. The home today is largely ruinous and deteriorated since the NRHP listing in 2007, and has been considered imperiled and one of the annual "11 to save" listed sites by the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. External Project Link: \N Additional Info Link: https://www.lib.usf.edu/dhhc/