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

From its founding as a steel-making area that rivaled any in the world for quality and quantity, to its present-day role as a leading banking, retail, and medical center for the New South, the rolling, iron-rich land of Jefferson County has been well represented in picture postcards. Roving photographers and those from local studios captured scenes of civic, business, and private life, and made them into postcards that were sent around the world. Birmingham and Jefferson County, Alabama takes the reader on a visual tour of such landmarks as the Tutwiler Hotel, the Empire Building, Rickwood Field, Legion Field, Arlington, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Explore the beginnings of world-class medical facilities, the rise of the iron and steel industry, and the rich cultural heritage that the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Greeks, and other ethnic groups brought to the area.

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.