Birmingham, Still the Magic City

I asked around, and people here do love the governor!

But seriously, though.

The name has fallen out of fashion, but Birmingham, Ala., was once dubbed “The Magic City” for its explosive industrial growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its earth yielded a rich mixture of coal, iron ore, and limestone — everything a city needs to make iron and steel. Birmingham was long dominated by the industry, whose workers lived in company houses and played one another on corporate baseball teams. Like nearly all factory towns, Birmingham began to shrink in the mid-20th century as America could acquire more metal for lower cost, both from domestic machinery and suppliers abroad.

So here Birmingham lies, still at the crossing of railroads in the middle of Alabama. The city is old, not too big, and much too hot. And I absolutely adore it.

This was not my first time visiting; we have family friends just outside city limits. Those who know me already know my feelings. Many times, someone has asked me: Why Birmingham? What is so special about this place? The answer: I don’t know. It’s impossible to translate into a precise explanation. It’s just perfect.

Maybe it’s that the city is large enough to have all the restaurants and activities you would expect, but not large enough to have much traffic or noise. Except for the cricket symphony at night, the city is beautifully quiet. In the suburbs beyond downtown, darn near everyone has a big, perfectly green front lawn. And a front porch, too, to sit and drink and say hello to the neighbors.

The street signs in the suburbs are old-timey as well. They’re in black and white, and hang from these quaint little poles.

Like Nancy Sinatra’s boots, the town markets are made for walkin’ around, and lined with artisan shops. Every product in every store proudly advertises that it’s from Alabama. Children are ubiquitous, many of whom roam freely with siblings or friends. It seems as though every man over 16 wears a collared polo shirt. If they didn’t, the bowls of braised vegetables they order with their meat would just be called “greens.”

If someone in Alabama offers you “meat and three,” it doesn’t matter what sort of meat or which three they’re referring to. Just say, “Yes please, and thank you, ma’am.”

Speaking of the people: I’ve visited Nashville, Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Houston, and the Florida panhandle. Everywhere, genuine Southern accents have become the exception, as families from around the country have flocked there over the years. In Birmingham, I dare you to find a resident without a full-throated Southern drawl. I reckon that Birmingham is so under the radar that outsiders don’t often move here. The people who already call it home know what they have, and they tend not to leave.

Undergirding this city is a spirit of industriousness that fuels its communities and binds them like steel through mutual aid and commitment. That is why the city is overseen by a sculpture of Vulcan — the Roman god of fire and forge — wielding the ironworking tools that helped erect Birmingham and so many other places. The construction of this statue — 56 feet tall (the world’s tallest made of iron), weighing 120,000 pounds, and cast in under three months — is a testament to how deeply Vulcan is rooted in Birmingham and its people.

He doesn’t look half-bad from behind, either.

I still have not done Birmingham justice. As I said, the feeling is indescribable — even magic, if you will. How about this: I love a whole lot of places across America. The way I feel about Iowa, about home . . . I have only felt a similar bliss in one other city. Birmingham, please, never change a thing.

This is an installment in a cross-country road-trip adventure.