I like to explore and learn a bit about the places I go to.
Birmingham, Alabama is a rather new city, by Eastern standards. Even the "old" stuff there isn't very old. There wasn't much of anything there until after the Civil War. Railroads (it has no navigable river), coal and iron ore were the key to that city's wealth, hence the borrowing of the name from the Brits. Amost all of that is now gone.
A new city in the New South.
With a metropolitan population of around 1 million, it's a good-sized city, but the city proper lacks downtown residences. It's a biz center now (most recently a banking center) - not a hopping urban scene. The Univ of Alabama Medical Center also is growing like crazy.
Still, there is no visible urban scene: life happens in the leafy, lovely, quiet suburbs.
On a weekend, there is not a soul to be seen on the streets yet it looks clean, prosperous, and safe. No "mixed use" as you find in NYC. A Jane Jacobs case study, because I have seen photos of the downtown in the 1920s which were packed with people on weekends and holidays, with the streets lined with storefronts.
In recent decades, the suburbs which had been part of the city spun themselves off so as to be independent of the constantly-alleged and often court-confirmed corruption of the Dem machine which runs it, and which seems determined to drive people out of town.
One cool thing about cities this size: you can get from Mountain Brook, Homewood, or downtown, to the airport in about 15 minutes. Everything seems easy to do. It's manageable and friendly. For the comfortable, golf seems to be king in Birmingham. Too darn hot for tennis, if you ask me.
Beautiful: the tee of the 4th (or 14th?) hole at Shoal Creek:
A free ad for the nifty mag Garden and Gun, with another golf course in the background:
Every city carries its burden of woeful history. The 16th St. Baptist Church, where the Civil Rights movement tragically obtained energy when some KKK killed four choir girls in church in 1963. The reputation of the fine people of the city was smeared for a generation by the behavior of a handful of murderous scumbags.
More below on continuation page -
A cool urban garden in downtown B'ham. Five acres of serious, for profit vegetable gardens, with the spanking-new government-subsidized housing on the right. We liked this mini-farm very much. Rus in urbe. Our only beef with the housing (which replaced the demolished high-rise poor folk housing which had stood in this neighborhood) is that there are no friendly storefronts. Even today, planners always get something wrong.
I saw no baseball diamond either.
Vulcan stands proud and bare-assed (it gets hot down there) as a memorial to the steel mills which built the city.
I said that downtown is empty on weekends - with the exception of the line to get into the library to enjoy the a/c:
