Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
–– Thomas Merton
The mid-morning of Easter Sunday in Birmingham brought what the old folks used to call “Chamber of Commerce” weather — meaning that an outsider who found himself in our city on just such a day might become convinced that he had happened into heaven. Cerulean sky. Golden sunlight slanted across the greening landscape. Birdsongs wafted from, it seemed, every tree in earshot. The breeze recalled the previous night’s chill with teasing persistence, even as the temperature climbed into the 60s.
Come to think of it, it seemed sort of like heaven to me too.
But it wasn’t heaven. It was Pratt City — which, on a day associated with renewal and resurrection, was as fitting a place to be, both figuratively and literally, as most any place this side of the Celestial Shore.
On the 27th of this month, it will be four years since a tornado of horrific intensity cut a swath across northwestern Jefferson County from Concord to Fultondale to the Warrior River, killing 19 people. The Birmingham neighborhood of Pratt City was among the areas hit hardest that afternoon.
That thought, however, was not what had brought me to Pratt City on Easter Sunday morning. I was there as the result of an impromptu urge to take a long, looping drive through Pratt and Ensley. These are two of Birmingham’s old industrial neighborhoods, two of the numerous that network the city’s sprawling footprint and dot the county beyond — places where the workers who toiled in the mines and mills that forged this city’s reputation as the Pittsburgh of the South lived and raised families and socialized and went to church and spent their hard-earned money.
These places are glorious to me. The stately architecture of the industrial and large commercial buildings; the beautiful utility of small shops, service stations, corner stores; the unmistakable stamp of craftsmanship and generally sound planning on the houses, the schools, the playgrounds and ballfields, the sidewalks and the signs.
These places speak evocatively of a time when a job in the mill or the mine was a ticket to something that bore at least some resemblance to a middle-class existence. That was true even for black miners and steelworkers in Birmingham, many of whom attained the status of homeowners and consumers in the years after World War II, despite the fact that their wages were considerably less than those paid to their white co-workers.
I have to note here, parenthetically, that many of those black workers made up for the inequity in pay by working one or more additional jobs, by having wives who worked, or both. Such was the price of being black and aspiring to upward mobility in the Birmingham of the 1950s and ‘60s. Again parenthetically, I find it interesting in a disturbing sort of way, that we actually have people bidding or preparing bids to be our next President who openly mock the notion that paying such a price was sufficient to secure for those people the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity.
Be all of that as it may, there I was in Pratt City on Easter Sunday morning walking past the Hibernian Street Church of God, catching muffled sounds of the service in progress. The church’s sign announced the topic of the Easter sermon: “In Everything, Give Thanks.”
I’d walked uphill to Hibernian on Dugan Avenue, where I’d pulled into the corner of a convenience store parking lot across the street from Birmingham Fire & Rescue Station 18. Coming into Pratt City off U.S. 78, I had intended to head straight for the neighborhood’s historic business district. Reaching the intersection at Dugan, I’d been struck by memories of my own presence there early on the morning after the April 27 tornado in my capacity as public information officer for the Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency and felt compelled to get out and take a walk. I made the right turn.
On that dawning day four years ago, there was no Fire Station 18; it had been demolished by the storm. Dugan Avenue was clogged with emergency response vehicles and personnel. The hillsides above it were ravaged, some houses gone completely, most in some advanced state of damage or destruction, a few miraculously intact, standing in testament to the immutable vagaries of nature. Today, almost every house in sight is new — though plenty of lots remain unoccupied, giving the rebuilt neighborhood on the hillside an uneven, snaggle-toothed look — and there is a new senior living complex at the bottom of the hill, behind the fire station.
At the corner of Dugan and Hibernian on that April 28, the Pratt City branch library looked as if it had been shelled by heavy artillery. I walked past it again on Easter — like the fire station, it has been rebuilt beautifully — and turned, as I did on that day, down Hibernian. Back then I’d encountered a man from the neighborhood, out surveying the damage for himself. He’d pointed down the street to a rectangular house with half the roof peeled away, and told me of seeing the tornado coming from his front yard. Running inside, he grabbed his two grandchildren and pushed them into a closet, and then dove behind a sofa, from whence he saw the roof beginning to separate from the rest of the house.
That house, too, has been repaired. New roof, new siding, painted a nice, muted shade of green. I walked by it Sunday, stopping at the corner where it sits to entertain the thought of knocking to see if the man still lives there. I decided against it and headed back toward the car.
If the area of Pratt City around the fire station and library is a place where renewal is tangible, the old business district a few blocks away is one where it remains ephemeral. Circling through the district a couple of times, considering the world of possibilities in its vacant buildings and the street-level charm that sparkles through decades of neglect, it was difficult not to consider as well the razor-thin line between decline and renewal, and to wonder whether, for all of our tangible progress, Birmingham is failing as a community.
That feeling deepened on the ride to Ensley, through neighborhoods where nothing has been remodeled, refurbished or rebuilt for more years than most people in Birmingham have been alive. Cross Village Creek on the old WPA bridge and, other than the new Jackson-Olin High School, you’ll encounter blocks and blocks where abandoned homes come near outnumbering those that are occupied — and if you don’t feel challenged to come to grips with the fact that Birmingham is a poor city that is getting poorer, then you are either heartless or too deeply gone in denial — or perhaps too bedazzled by the bread and circuses provided us by City Hall — to know reality when it slaps you in the face.
What is the answer? Better government? More engaged citizens? Better use of our community’s tremendous, and yet still limited, resources?
Yes, all of these things. All of these things and balance — balance between downtown and the neighborhoods. Balance between the things we want to do and the things we must do. Balance between our desire to see Birmingham become a great city and the realization that unless we cultivate ways — beyond the necessity of recovering from a natural disaster — to bring a sense of priority and urgency to our approach to community development and the expansion of economic opportunity. To do less is to betray the integrity and legacy of the neighborhoods on which our community was built.