Much like St. Louis and its Woolworth Building in Grand Center, Birmingham also has a two story base that was designed with the intention of later having an upper office building added.

The Florentine, which is not surprisingly in the Renaissance Revival Style, was built in 1925-27 according to designs by the architect, David O. Whilldin.

I assumed that this building at some point housed a famous Italian restaurant, but that is not the case.

It doesn’t seem like there’s actually a restaurant, but rather a catering company in the ground floor space.

The terra cotta is worthy of the work of St. Louis artisans.

I enjoyed walking around downtown Birmingham.

Having been laid out as a planned industrial town, the streets are wide and rectilinear, and there are no weird idiosyncrasies, at least in the downtown.

There are some fancy Modernist parking garages! The first one actually has two office floors on the top.

I spotted this building and immediately knew it was a former department store. Like most American cities, the old storied department store in central cities are extinct.

One thing I liked about Birmingham’s downtown are the large number of different sizes of buildings, giving entrepreneurs freedom and flexibility to move in.

As I’ve voiced before, downtown St. Louis suffers from far too many blocks that are taken up by one huge building, having long pushed out small storefronts.

And Birmingham still retains some cool old signs.