Long Beach Bay Avenue
— a street the live oaks held when the wind didn't.
Not only on a wall.
Long Beach Bay Avenue, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Bay Avenue runs through old Long Beach under a canopy of live oaks, two blocks back from the Mississippi Sound. Some of the trees are well over a century old. The storm in 2005 took most of the houses to the slab and left the oaks standing. Houses came back, smaller and on higher piers, between the same trees. The town keeps the address numbers from before. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Long Beach is a small city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Harrison County, between Pass Christian to the west and Gulfport to the east, facing the Mississippi Sound. Its population was about 16,000 at the 2020 census. Bay Avenue is one of the old east-west residential streets of the historic core, set a few blocks inland from U.S. Highway 90 and the beach, under a long canopy of southern live oaks (Quercus virginiana). The town was hit head-on by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge in August 2005, with much of the south-of-tracks neighbourhood destroyed.
The Gulf Coast air at Long Beach carries salt and warm pine off the sound; summer humidity sits high, and afternoon thunderstorms build over the water and come ashore by late afternoon. Hurricane season runs June through November, and the live oaks lining Bay Avenue have weathered Camille in 1969 and Katrina in 2005, the two storms that define the modern coast. The Friendship Oak on the nearby University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Park campus is estimated at more than 500 years old and stands as the visual reference for the canopy.
Long Beach is open to drive through year-round, with Bay Avenue and the parallel residential streets best seen on foot or by bike under the oak canopy. The harbour at the foot of Jeff Davis Avenue holds the small-craft fleet and the town pier. U.S. 90 runs the beach two blocks south of Bay Avenue, with the white-sand Harrison County beach across it. The town's historic district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and rebuilt in a recognisable but smaller form after 2005, with most new houses raised on piers.
