It’s that time of year, so it’s time for odds and ends! Above is a spandrel from a storefront in downtown Belleville, looking suspiciously like something Louis Sullivan would design. Below is just another house we found while driving around town. Cleveland High School is looking really, really bad compared to earlier visits; I first…
Category: Afield
Posts from further afield
Elvis Presley Birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi
On my way back to St. Louis from Birmingham, I passed through Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The house is now a museum. Tupelo is a beautiful town that has successfully parlayed its major tourist attraction into a boon for the local economy. Instead of massive parking lots, the downtown has embraced new-urbanism,…
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Our final stop in Birmingham was the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is still in operation just outside of downtown. This was the site of the horrific bombing that killed four girls in 1963, which you can read about here. Here is the location on the side of the church where it happened, below. Across…
Redmont Park, Birmingham, Alabama
South of downtown is Redmont Park, and a host of other exclusive neighborhoods and I’ll admit that we probably wandered into other areas as well. I can say without a doubt that it is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the United States, and these photographs do not do justice showing that. It got…
Cafe Florentine and Other Sights, Downtown, Birmingham, Alabama
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….
St. Paul Roman Catholic Cathedral, Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham was founded in 1871, and the first Catholic church, a rustic affair, was founded in 1872, so while Alabama is famous for the Southern Baptist Church, Catholicism still has a presence. The elegant church of St. Paul became the cathedral of Birmingham in 1969, after having been a co-cathedral with Mobile since 1955. Mobile,…
Vulcan, Birmingham, Alabama
Originally cast to represent Alabama’s industrial strength at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, the symbol of Birmingham is now situated high above the city on a tall plinth. Not surprisingly, the modello for the sculpture was created by an Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, already…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part Two
We now enter the Sloss Furnaces complex, and walk around the public path on the southeast portion of the grounds. Above is a photograph of the furnaces before the 1930s refitting. We walked by a tunnel that was unfortunately flooded the day we visited, but much of the material in the smelting process moved back…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part One
As I mentioned on our first day introducing Birmingham, all three of the components for making steel was readily available in close proximity to the city. Iron ore, in fact, could be found at Red Mountain, which is about a mile south from downtown. The iron ore was taken to blast facilities such as the…
Two Cemeteries, Birmingham, Alabama
We looked at two cemeteries in the Birmingham, the first of which was Highland Memorial Gardens, founded in 1954. This is an example of a memorial park; while there are a few headstones, the vast majority of gravestones are flush with the lawn, giving a more clean and modern look that took over cemetery design…