Exposing Birmingham's beauty

As the members of Steel City Urbex explored the newly opened Thomas Jefferson Tower with its furnished apartments and rebuilt zeppelin-mooring mast, they compared it to the abandoned building they had explored not so long ago.

“It was like a time capsule. There was so much stuff left in here. I never even made it to the roof because you get lost going on each floor seeing what was left,” said Urbex member Josh Box, who first explored the Thomas Jefferson Tower about seven years ago.

“When they said they were going to open this thing back up, I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ Holes were in the floor. It was horrible. Dust everywhere, it was dirty. I don’t know how long it had been since someone had been in here,” Urbex co-founder Jake Evans said.

Because they were invited to see the reopened tower, there was a definite upside to visiting an occupied building rather than an abandoned one.

“It’s much easier using an elevator to get up to the roof than going up the stairs,” Evans said.

The Steel City Urbex (short for urban exploration) was started by Evans and lifelong friend Justin Self based on a mutual love of exploring abandoned buildings and photographing the things they find. 

Their first official adventure, along with now-member Matt Glasscock, was to the Memorial Mound, an abandoned mausoleum in Bessemer.

Their exploration of the Mound, where they found several buried bodies and evidence of break-ins and theft, earned the group some media attention. While a lot of urban explorers only share their discoveries with a small group of people, Evans said he saw an opportunity to share an unseen side of Alabama.

“I knew that was an aspect we needed in Steel City Urbex. I wanted to get people’s attention. I wanted to get people upset because that’s how you get people,” Evans said. “I want people to be like, ‘Whoa, this is cool.’”

Two years later, the Urbex has gotten people’s attention. They have nearly 10,000 followers on Facebook — including meteorologist and local celebrity James Spann — and nearly 4,000 on Instagram. A typical outing for the nine members of the Urbex includes several cameras, a GoPro mounted on Evans’ home-made selfie stick and Glasscock’s phone ready to broadcast Facebook Live videos as needed.

Many of the Urbex’s adventures have been in downtown Birmingham, including Carraway Hospital, the Pizitz building before its renovation and City Federal, where member Brett Bellomy climbed up to hang from the neon letters. They have also explored factories, old mines, mills and other long-empty buildings in other Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee locations.

Box in particular has a love for mines.

“These guys like the top of buildings, everything like that. My passion is underground, abandoned mines,” Box said. “Anyone can see the buildings but to actually go underground and see what the catalyst [is] that brought the city out — because underground built this city.”

Glasscock said he often finds new sites to investigate just by driving around or talking to longtime residents of the city. Self said what catches his eye in a building is its history and any items left behind by previous occupants.

“If you go inside a building and there’s nothing left, just walls and the floor, it’s not much to shoot,” Self said. “I know in this building [Thomas Jefferson Tower] before it got renovated, there were some TVs, a bunch of stuff in the basement, actually items in the rooms.”

And sometimes, one exploration leads to another.

“It seems like every time I go on top of a building, I see something new that looks really cool,” Self said.

It can be a little perilous with the structural conditions of some of the buildings, which is why the Urbex doesn’t reveal the locations of every place they visit. “Somebody will go there and get hurt,” Evans said.

Sometimes the danger comes in unexpected forms. The first time Bellomy joined the Urbex on a trip, the group encountered a rattlesnake, spiders falling from the ceiling and a strange man chasing them. After the trip, Evans remembers thinking Bellomy “is never going to hang out with us again.”

“It all fell apart. It was horrible but still fun,” Bellomy said.

But Bellomy did stay, not only because he enjoyed urban exploration but also because he enjoyed the people doing the exploring. Evans said he loves that the Urbex has become a way to spend time with “likeminded people.”

The Steel City Urbex has a code of conduct, in a way. In addition to keeping many of their locations secret, Urbex members don’t drink, smoke, graffiti or bring backpacks inside to steal anything left behind. While they don’t always ask for permission to enter buildings, Evans said they don’t force their way in either.

“We’re not ever going to break anything to come in. If the door is not open, we’re not coming in. If there’s not a hole in the fence that we can squeeze through or a little gap … we’re not getting in. We will not tear down or vandalize anything,” Evans said.

Since they aren’t harming the buildings, Evans said the few times they have encountered police have resulted in new Instagram followers rather than being escorted out.

Box said being part of the Urbex gives him a chance at “exposing the city for the beauty that it really is.” Plus, it’s just fun to see something few Birmingham residents ever will.

“Some people go to the movies and pay $20 for a tub of popcorn, and we go take pictures for fun,” Glasscock said.

But it’s not for everyone. Evans warned the average person should probably just watch the Urbex’s adventures from Facebook.

“There’s a lot of stuff that people would never know about in this city because they don’t get out, they don’t do these kinds of things — which is OK. You’re not supposed to. We’re crazy. This is what we do,” Evans said. “And my thing was, I’ve always wanted everyone to see how awesome this city really is.”