Birmingham's Highland Park originated in the 1880s when a grand boulevard was dug and three lush parks were planned at the northern foothills of Red Mountain. This boulevard was Highland Avenue, at the time the widest street in the South. The development, built within three miles of the center of Birmingham, included the construction of a resort hotel and lake. A dummy line rail system conveyed the populace of The Magic City" out to the beautiful Highland Park neighborhood, where in summer the air was both cooler and cleaner. Although Highland Avenue was lined with mansions of every architectural style, only 12 remain today. Indeed, some Highland Park dwellers have resided for generations in this neighborhood of true character and charm."

Birmingham's Highland Park originated in the 1880s when a grand boulevard was dug and three lush parks were planned at the northern foothills of Red Mountain. This boulevard was Highland Avenue, at the time the widest street in the South. The development, built within three miles of the center of Birmingham, included the construction of a resort hotel and lake. A dummy line rail system conveyed the populace of The Magic City" out to the beautiful Highland Park neighborhood, where in summer the air was both cooler and cleaner. Although Highland Avenue was lined with mansions of every architectural style, only 12 remain today. Indeed, some Highland Park dwellers have resided for generations in this neighborhood of true character and charm."

Your Travel Destination. Your Home. Your Home-To-Be. Birmingham Festivals. Architectural gems. Green spaces. Friendly faces. The Magic City. A special kind of place. • A personal, practical perspective for travelers and residents alike • Comprehensive listings of attractions, restaurants, and accommodations • How to live & thrive in the area—from recreation to relocation • Countless details on shopping, arts & entertainment, and children’s activities

One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.

On growing up in the American South of the 1960s—an all-American white boy—son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. "My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher," writes John Archibald. "It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place." Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is "refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion." In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person? Archibald had seen his father, the Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., the son and grandson of Methodist preachers, as a moral authority, a moderate and a moderating force during the racial turbulence of the '60s, a loving and dependable parent, a forgiving and attentive minister, a man many Alabamians came to see as a saint. But was that enough? Even though Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father's pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, or banished, or worse. Archibald's father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. He spoke to his flock in the safety of parable, and trusted in the goodness of others, even when they earned none of it, rising through the ranks of the Methodist Church, and teaching his family lessons in kindness and humanity, and devotion to nature and the Earth. Archibald writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.

A late arrival on the Southern landscape, the city of Birmingham was not incorporated until after the Civil War. In fact, from 1820 to 1871, what is now Birmingham was known as the hamlet of Elyton, a small crossroads set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where several Pony Express and stage routes crossed paths. When two railroads eventually intersected at this point—where, significantly, all the ingredients necessary to make iron existed in close proximity—the region’s growth exploded. Birmingham’s history is not a story of the grace and vanished grandeur of an antebellum past, but rather, a dynamic story of modern American industrialization.Sites covered include: Hollywood, Alabama State Fairgrounds, Vulcan Park, Mountain Brook Village, The Old Mill, Avondale Park, Highland Park, Woodlawn High, Quinlan Castle, Five Points South, Bottega Favorita, Old Jefferson County Courthouse, Capitol Park, Tutwiler Hotel, Twentieth Street, Louise Wooster Brothel, Alabama Theatre, Kress Department Store, Joy Young Restaurant, Terminal Station, Molton Hotel, Lovemans, Massey Building, Bright Star, Temple of Sibyl, Sloss Furnaces, Red Mountain and Legion Field.

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