I visited my friends Kate and Kevin over the Memorial Day weekend in Birmingham, Alabama and had the opportunity to explore what turns out to be an incredibly fascinating city. As usual I am not going to make this a recap of my vacation but rather show Birmingham as I found it, as honestly as I can. And I found lots of good things, and some things that were not so great.

First a little history. Birmingham is a relatively young city, having only been founded by business interests in 1871 to produce steel. Apparently it is one of only a few places in the United States where the three components of steel production–iron ore, coal and limestone–are found in close proximity to each other. In the Midwest, at least one of those three had to be brought to the steel mill by the railroad or Great Lakes freighter. The city grew rapidly, but the specters of segregation and poverty hung over Birmingham as it grew prosperous. There are beautiful, stunning neighborhoods in Birmingham, but there are also miles after miles of dilapidated houses where many people, particularly African Americans, have been left behind.

And that leads me to an important aspect of my tour of Birmingham. Sure, I could show you a couple of weeks worth of bombed out, abandoned houses, and it would be honest, but I’m not going to do that. There is much more to the city than abandonment; there is revitalization in the inner core and many wonderful neighborhoods in the urban core.

Take the intersection in downtown Birmingham, christened by local boosters as the “Heaviest Corner on Earth” due to there being four beautiful historic skyscrapers located on each corner. While I hate to break it to them that New York and Chicago probably have multiple intersections that are heavier than this one, I can report that the four skyscrapers here in Birmingham have been redeveloped into a hotel and other new uses.

And Birmingham has a St. Louis connection; Alabama commissioned a giant statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge to be displayed at the 1904 World’s Fair. When it came back, it was put on a tall plinth high on a hill overlooking Birmingham.

Birmingham was rightly proud of its steel mills, though much of that industry has transitioned to making of other aspects of steel fabrication if not outright smelting. But the ruins left behind, we’ll see, are stunning. But let us not romanticize it; the conditions at the mills and mines were atrocious.

We also walked in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, who came to Birmingham to fight segregation.

I think that Birmingham, perhaps the most industrialized city in the South, is an interesting example to compare and contrast with St. Louis, so let’s take a look.