Boomtown once again

Birmingham picked up the moniker “The Magic City” when it was a young, fast-growing industrial boomtown in the late 19th century — a city on the make. 

It later picked up some less flattering nicknames, including “The Tragic City,” for its failure — during decades of relative social and economic stagnation — to live up to its early promise.

But it seems that Birmingham, despite serious remaining challenges, has become something of a “Magic City” once again.

After decades of decline, the city’s population appears to have stabilized. 

Some of the city’s struggling neighborhoods, including Norwood, Avondale and Woodlawn, are showing signs of rebirth.

Long haunted by a terrible image forged in the crucible of racial conflict in the 1960s, Birmingham has recently earned some positive national press, in part for its now-celebrated food and brewery culture.

And nowhere is the city’s renewed vigor more obvious than in its downtown core, which is rapidly being rebuilt. In fact, that busy area is now replete with powerful visual signifiers of Birmingham’s rebirth.

On 14th Street South rises the elegant façade of Regions Field, home of minor-league baseball team the Birmingham Barons. The team made a real, but also heavily symbolic, return from the suburbs in 2013 and won a Southern League pennant in its new downtown home. 

Nearby, Railroad Park serves as a beautiful urban oasis, one that has been eagerly adopted by the city’s residents.

On Third Avenue North, one finds the beautiful Lyric Theatre, a vaudeville palace recently restored after decades of persistent, grassroots efforts, mirroring the restoration of the city that surrounds it.

There are dozens of other projects, too, both renovations and new construction — hotels, restaurants, apartment buildings, even a Publix supermarket. 

“You go from one construction site to another … and I love it,” said Michael Calvert, who served for 28 years as the head of Operation New Birmingham.

All of this energy is almost intoxicating, and it made us at Starnes Publishing want to create Iron City Ink. After all, we want to be where the action is. 

We want to contribute to the city’s growth by telling the stories and sharing the voices  of Birmingham residents of all ages, colors and types as they recreate the Magic City — not only downtown but also the neighborhoods — for the 21st century. 

We also want to explore — both today and in future issues — some of the deeper trends or factors driving Birmingham’s revival, examine the city’s serious problems and challenges and try to learn more about the kind of future the people of this city can claim for themselves.

One thing seems certain: After decades of disappointment, the people of Birmingham — especially young people — seem to be reaching back and recovering, at least to an extent, the positive, can-do spirit of that early boomtown.

And like them, we are excited to begin the journey.

Reasons for a turnaround

► UAB: One factor in Birmingham’s recent downtown growth was economic: the end of the Great Recession. 

“There was pent-up demand until about 2013, 2014, and projects started then are nearing completion,” Calvert said. 

But there are deeper reasons, and the area’s biggest employer, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is probably the biggest factor in the city’s turnaround. 

“The contribution of UAB to Birmingham is hard to overstate,” Calvert said. “If you imagine Birmingham without UAB, we would be a much smaller, much more boring place.” 

UAB has an annual economic impact exceeding $5 billion, sees a million patients a year in its clinics and hospitals and attracts about $500 million a year in extramural grant funding, school officials say. 

“I think our growth and prosperity has helped shore up the economy of Birmingham and [Jefferson County], and I think we have grown into good mutual partners,” said UAB President and Birmingham Business Alliance Chairman Ray Watts, who said the school added economic development as its fifth mission pillar several years ago. 

The school is also reshaping downtown. When it became an independent campus in 1969, UAB covered a few blocks. Now, the school — dubbed “The University that Ate Birmingham” — covers about 100 blocks. 

UAB is expanding beyond its traditional northern and southern boundaries, helping spur development in the area near Regions Field, according to Watts. 

“UAB is meeting downtown in Parkside,” he said. 

► Diversifying economy: Birmingham, once called “The Pittsburgh of the South,” has diversified its economy during the past 30 years, moving away from a reliance on manufacturing toward medicine and finance, a move that has helped feed its current vitality. 

UAB has played a role in this, drawing students, teachers and researchers from around the world. 

It also partnered with the City of Birmingham’s Entrepreneurial Center in 2007 to create downtown’s Innovation Depot business incubator, which nurtures at any given time about 100 high-tech startups. 

Watts cites the incubator’s “incredible energy,” including the on-site UAB Innovation Lab, or iLab. 

“These young people want to come to Birmingham, and more of them now, instead of leaving after they get a great education, want to stay here and start companies or join companies,” he said. 

Birmingham is also leaving its mark on other industries. 

For example, Southern Research in Southside works in everything from cancer cures to metals research.

The city has two high-end motorcycle manufacturers: Confederate Motors and Motus Motorcycles. 

Integrated Medical Systems International, with an impressive campus in the Sloss Business District, is a growing surgical instrument and clinical consulting company. 

“Birmingham has done a pretty good job periodically in reinventing itself,” said Jim Baggett, head of the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library and an avid student of the city’s history. “It started out as an industrial, mainly a steel town, and reinvented itself as a financial center and a medical center, which I think saved us from becoming Detroit.” 

► Entrepreneurs: The revival of Birmingham’s downtown was driven in part by developers such as John Lauriello of Southpace Properties and Jeffrey Bayer of Bayer Properties, who had a “laser concentration” on saving and redeveloping “existing great buildings,” said Geoff Langdon, owner of Advantage Marketing on 20th Street North downtown. 

Bayer, for example, along with partner David Silverstein, recently began renovating the historic Pizitz department store building on Second Avenue North.

Langdon also praises entrepreneurs, such as Jim Reed of Jim Reed Books and Andrew Collins of the old Lyric Hot Dogs & Grill, who “doggedly and, many times, hand-to-mouth, kept their unique businesses going.”

Local chefs such as Frank Stitt III and Chris Hastings not only achieved national renown, but also kickstarted Birmingham’s blossoming food culture.

Later arrivals, such as restaurateur Chris Dupont and Steve Gilmer, owner of the What’s on Second collectibles shop, also played a role, Langdon said.

REV Birmingham CEO David Fleming said food “often leads the way to renovation” and cited such examples as Rogue Tavern and Urban Standard, which helped energize Second Avenue North. 

► Fresh blood: Birmingham, long an insular place, has recently attracted outsiders, including entrepreneurs, who’ve given the city new life. 

“Lots of independent dreamers have individually and accidentally converged on the city to try to make their dreams come true,” Reed said. 

For example, Ohio natives Geoff Lockert and Brian Somershield started three downtown restaurants: El Barrio, Trattoria Centrale and Paramount. 

One of the city’s best galleries, Naked Art, is operated by Véronique Vanblaere from Belgium, who moved here in 1996. 

Sharrif Simmons, a New York native who appeared on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam,” has lived in Birmingham for 12 years and left his mark as a poet, musician and storyteller. 

Reed added that city leaders had little to do with this “convergence.” 

“Instead of leaving the planning and dreaming and action to slow-moving bureaucrats, small entrepreneurs just went ahead and did their thing,” Reed said. 

“There are great things happening here, and I have to attribute some of that to people coming here from other places who don’t have that Birmingham baggage and the sort of Birmingham sense of inferiority,” Baggett said. 

Langdon, a New York native, agreed: “Folks come here and see the beauty and potential with an enthusiasm that comes from an outsider’s point of view.”

► Generational and cultural shift: Birmingham’s efforts to revitalize the inner city and encourage downtown living have been greatly aided by a national trend in which many young people and empty-nester Boomers have left the suburbs and embraced urban living. 

“There has been a real shift,” Calvert said, adding a “shift in attitudes and lifestyle” seems to have begun in popular culture as early as the 1970s and came to the Magic City with the first downtown lofts in 1986. 

This cultural change was reflected in 1990s city-set TV sitcoms such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends” and even in fashion photography, where “the cool place was a grungy alley,” Calvert said. 

In addition, many people who grew up in the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s found them “stifling and boring,” he said. Some of those same people “grew up seeing their parents struggle with traffic” and developed a desire to avoid long commutes, according to Calvert. 

Fleming said projects such as Railroad Park and Regions Field came to town at the right time and served as “catalysts that give people different ways to interact in urban space in positive ways.”

Remaining problems

All is not perfect in Birmingham, of course. 

Crime, including the sound of gunshots, is a day-to-day reality in far too many of Birmingham’s neighborhoods. Birmingham was named the fifth-worst large city in the country for violent crime, property crime and overall crime in statistics released by the FBI in September 2015. 

The city’s schools, with some exceptions, are inadequate. In fact, 18 of them — including five high schools — were recently included on the state’s list of failing schools. 

There’s also a public perception that the city is progressing in spite of, not because of, its political leadership. Mayor William Bell overwhelmingly won his last re-election bid; however, a persistent, and at times embarrassing, conflict between Bell and the City Council has created some unwanted national press for the city when it finally has other things — good things — to brag about.

But one of the greatest problems the city faces, according to several officials, is a lack of unity and community purpose in the metro area. 

The Birmingham metro is, as Baggett puts it, “Balkanized,” meaning there are dozens of municipalities that are not sufficiently cooperating to attack general concerns such as transit. 

In contrast, several Southern cities that have surpassed Birmingham in population, including Nashville, Tennessee, have created metro governments to boost cooperation and efficiency. 

“I would like to see us continue to break down siloes and work across lines to solve issues — not just transit, but transportation as a whole — and more things we can do together,” Fleming said. 

“The biggest thing holding us back is we have not come together as a community through the whole metro area,” Baggett added. “There are all these little fiefdoms, and these people with their little seats of power don’t want to give that up.” 

The metro needs greater cooperation to make real progress, Calvert agreed. “The leadership potential in the whole area is much greater than in any one place — Birmingham, Vestavia Hills, wherever,” he said. “If you have that whole pool of leadership, you can energize that and do common efforts and we could go a lot farther a lot quicker.” 

Calvert hopes for positive change, however, and said Bell “has the abilities to reach out and be well-received on a metropolitan level, and so I think we need to keep working in that direction.”

But it’s not just an urban-suburban split, according to Baggett. 

“We’re so Balkanized within the city, too,” he said. “There’s a split … between the neighborhoods and downtown, and there are still racial issues.” 

“It’s not just suburban communities that want their independence,” Calvert added. “There are city districts and neighborhoods that like the power they have.” 

There has been a long-standing suspicion among some neighborhood residents that downtown gets more support than they do, something Calvert saw during his years running ONB.

“It’s easy to focus on downtown and even some of the close-in neighborhoods, like Crestwood, but there are still major challenges with many large areas of the city,” he said. 

There shouldn’t be “rivalry or tension” between downtown and the neighborhoods, according to Calvert. 

“The stronger downtown is, the stronger the neighborhoods and communities are,” he said. 

The 2012 merger of ONB with Main Street Birmingham to create REV Birmingham was a positive, according to Calvert. Unlike ONB, which only served downtown and Southside, REV has a mandate to help spur business in neighborhoods, he said. 

“We always need to be conscious of how we can get better so that each community can get what it needs,” Fleming said regarding REV. However, he stressed the organization focuses only on neighborhood commercial districts. “We are not set up to solve all of a community’s problems,” he said. 

There are “encouraging trends” in some city neighborhoods, according to Calvert, who said there is “a swath of strong neighborhoods” from Glen Iris through Southside, Forest Park, Avondale and Crestwood. 

“I think Birmingham’s best assets can be found in its neighborhoods, as well as its biggest challenges,” said Melodie Echols, executive director of the Norwood Resource Center. “The challenges are linked to the need for investment in infrastructure improvements and strategic repopulation. The strength of Birmingham is its backbone — residents who have cared for their homes, schools and neighbors for decades, preserving the city for those who are newly interested in joining in the continuous creation of community.”

Echols also believes the city “could benefit from better PR about the good news in Birmingham neighborhoods” and that the “exciting things” in the downtown area get far more attention. 

Norwood — named one of the “Best Old House Neighborhoods” in the nation by This Old House magazine — has historic homes, lots of green space and is in close proximity to Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport and downtown, Echols said. 

Numerous Birmingham nonprofits and foundations are working to help improve the city’s quality of life and address the various needs of struggling Birmingham neighborhoods.

The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham seeks to help make the Birmingham area a healthier place to live, to make neighborhoods more livable and to help individuals and families become economically secure. 

Environmental group Freshwater Land Trust helped attract federal grants to begin building the huge Red Rock Ridge and Trail system of bike and walking trails. 

And the Woodlawn Foundation, Mike & Gillian Goodrich Foundation and other partners are working in Woodlawn to improve the lives of residents in terms of education, nutrition and housing. 

The Goodrich Foundation is taking what it calls a “holistic approach,” believing a community’s problems can’t be solved in isolation. 

“You have to work on housing and education and all those things that make communities healthy,” Executive Director Carol Butler said. 

The spirit of the city

Whatever problems a city faces, it can usually solve them if it has good leadership and if its people are optimistic that positive change is possible. There are signs the people of Birmingham are becoming a little more optimistic, even confident, after some of the city’s recent successes. 

And there are good reasons — economic, cultural, even psychological — why the people of Birmingham were less than optimistic for several decades about their city and its ability to fulfill its destiny. 

According to Baggett, some of that pessimism was created by the strife of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. 

“The Civil Rights Movement was scarring for a lot of people — African-Americans, for obvious reasons, but also a lot of adult whites from that period were terrified of not understanding how the world could be structured differently,” he said. 

It also took Birmingham quite a while to “come to terms with its racial history,” Baggett said. “There was a period of denial, especially among whites … but we reached a period where, not everyone, but a lot of people have embraced this history.” 

There are also economic factors that long pre-date the Civil Rights era, to the time when Birmingham was an industrial boomtown. 

“We were essentially a colonial economy,” said Baggett, referring to the tremendous economic leverage wielded by U.S. Steel, which was based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“We’ve had that aspect of a colonial economy that held us back and held us down and kept us obsequious to these outside interests,” he said.

Birmingham was also devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The city was arguably “the worst-hit town in the county,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said. 

While the city and its factories recovered during the post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s, it remained hostile to social innovation and had yet to confront its racial tensions.

Atlanta, once the same size as Birmingham, surpassed it in growth in the 1960s with corporate headquarters, a huge airport, major-league sports and a fast-growing population. 

Cities such as Nashville and Charlotte, once smaller than Birmingham, surpassed it in population in the 1980s and 1990s. 

No wonder Birmingham no longer felt like such a “Magic City.” 

Perhaps now Birmingham, once on track to become a major American city at the time of the Crash of 1929, can finally forge its own identity. 

“I’m optimistic, partially because the people here across the board are doing good things, and we are a city that has begun to turn a corner about its own attitude about itself,” Fleming said. “One of the most frustrating things for me in doing (development) work has not been that the city didn’t have potential but that we didn’t see it in ourselves. I think we are seeing it in ourselves now.” 

“Birmingham is becoming proud of itself again,” Watts added. 

The future

Despite its remaining problems, including the seemingly intractable challenge of fixing a transit system, it seems that Birmingham has turned a corner. 

But there are some cautionary notes, at least in terms of continuing the revival of the downtown area.

The Alabama Legislature has not renewed the state Historical Rehabilitation Tax Credit that was instrumental in helping developers renovate some key properties downtown, including the Pizitz building and the Thomas Jefferson Hotel.

Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston, and other legislators delayed a proposed seven-year extension of the credit. It was never called up for a vote.

“There is no question that [the tax credit] helped … deliver private-sector investment into what might be perceived as a risky place or a risky project,” Fleming said. 

And Birmingham is still a “risky market,” Fleming said. 

“We still need that additional stimulus.”

Reed cautioned that “top-down” planning by experts is not the best way to make downtown vital and healthy. 

“I dream of a day when city leadership will take a chance and actually plan for progress from the bottom up,” he said. “I suggest really listening to the street people, the merchants and professionals who ply their trade at ground level and have decades of hardcore, day-to-day experience, knowledge and wisdom to share with the planners. We are seldom asked.” 

However, Watts — a Magic City native and UAB graduate — is bullish. 

“I am more optimistic about UAB and Birmingham’s future than I have ever been in my life,” he said. “I look out my window and see Birmingham growing. If anyone wants to know what development looks like, just look around.” 

“Birmingham is on the verge of a renaissance,” Watts said. 

UAB and other large governmental and corporate entities are working to push the city forward, according to Watts. 

“In recent years, you see the best alignment that we’re ever had between our city and county government leaders, the BBA and major corporate leaders, and community leaders and UAB,” he said. “We are partnering more than ever.” 

Watts also said UAB and numerous public- and private-sector partners “want to prepare Birmingham for an even bigger wave of growth around a new innovation district downtown.” 

The public will be hearing about this district, which will build on the success of Innovation Depot, in the “coming months,” according to Watts, who said the area will include a technology building for larger companies to obtain permanent homes.

The UAB campus and the new technology district will also have “the fastest internet connections you can buy,” Watts said 

The BBA has also assembled a five-year plan for the area called Blueprint 2020, which Watts calls “a very analytical study” of Birmingham’s major opportunities and growth areas.

“I think the city is going to grow,” Baggett said. “The population has already stopped declining, and I think people are coming back in the city, and as the city grows, we should get better leadership as more people to step into leadership roles.”

Despite his optimism, Baggett doesn’t pretend to be a soothsayer. 

“I don’t know what Birmingham is going to look like in 50 years, but I think it’s going to be good.”