Native Daughter Condoleezza Rice Returns to Roots

Great Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (left) and Dr. Rice greet Chris McNair and Junie Peevy (standing right of Rice), whose relatives died in the 16th Street Church bombing, during a city ceremony honoring the Four Little Girls. (photo credit: Steve Toole)

When U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice steps onto the world stage, she brings a little bit of Birmingham with her.

Design of a Decade - A New Vision for Downtown

Pittsburgh consultant Don Carter stood center stage at the Alabama Theater in October before a crowd of more than 100 Birmingham citizens. They’d skipped watching the World Series historic game between the Red Sox and the Cardinals, wanting instead to see Urban Design Associates unveil the almost-final version of a Master Plan for the City Center.

Over the next 10 years, Carter says, Downtown Birmingham could see:

• Thousands of new loft apartments, condos and rental units in new City Center urban residential districts;
• Hundreds of new single-family homes, many of them affordable, in the nine historic   neighborhoods that border the business district;
• An expanded UAB campus and related biomedical and high-tech businesses to support the university’s world-class medical and other researchers;
• Thriving theaters, restaurants and other attractions – at Third and Fourth Avenues North, in Lakeview, and around the expanded Civic Center complex – that attract diverse citizens and visitors;
• A new central park for Birmingham, the Reservation Rail Road Park, the crown jewel of urban green space on a spot that currently resembles an industrial rustbelt.

“This is the vision for the City Center of Birmingham,” Carter says, concluding his nearly hour-long address.

The plan still has to be tweaked, adding some last-minute touches based on comments made after the presentation. And, Carter adds, further studies would be needed to ensure that some of the long-range plans – like taking the raised Interstate 20/59 roadwork down into a below-ground roadway – can actually be accomplished.

In the end, Urban Design Associates and Birmingham Mayor Bernard Kincaid, who enthusiastically supports the proposal, will present the final Master Plan to the City Council. Once council members and other planning officials give it their blessings, the plan is supposed to guide the City Center’s development during the next 10 years.

But some aren’t necessarily waiting for that day to come.

Operation New Birmingham, which has the growth and development of Downtown as its central focus, has a charge from both the City and Jefferson County to begin work with businesses, developers and citizens to continue or start implementing aspects of the plan.

The Master Plan UDA unveiled helps Birmingham better understand what kind of city it is now and what sort of city it can become, Kincaid tells a group of business and community leaders at a recent ONB breakfast meeting. “(The Plan) gives us an ideal look at what we want to be. Now we have to determine how we want to get there.”

ONB Executive Director Michael Calvert then unveiled a campaign called “Implementation Now,” an effort to raise $4.5 million to help ONB fulfill its new mandate. The City and the County together has committed half of the total amount. Kincaid has asked the private sector to raise the remainder.

“Let’s band together behind Mike Calvert and Operation New Birmingham, and take this City Center – which belongs to all of us – and let’s move the “Implementation Now” Plan for the City of Birmingham,” Kincaid tells the crowd.

Private businesses have pledges to pull $1.55 million of the $2.25 million of the total amount for ONB’s Implementation Now campaign, as of mid November.

Carter of UDA said it will take this kind of public/private partnership to make this plan work. “There’s no point in spending public money if there isn't going to be private investment,” he says.

Taxpayer money from governments, along with federal tax credits and other financial incentives, have helped jump-start the loft development ripple in Downtown. Developers and other believe the ripple will turn into a swell, and – if UDA’s projections are right – into a future tidal wave of urban living in the City Center.

Case in point: Leo Ticheli used this reasoning to convince his brother Ed – who’s done loft developments in New York -- about opportunities to do the same in Birmingham. The Tichelis and their partners intend to convert several abandoned Downtown buildings into loft apartments and condos.

The City and agencies like ONB can grease the skids not only for loft developments, but for developments of all sorts in the areas identified as growth initiative areas in the City Center.

The Master Plan breaks the City Center into four main initiative focal areas:

• The Civil Rights District (in blue), where the plan calls for increased residential developments, such as the parking lot across from the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

• The Technology/Cultural District (in orange), where high-tech and biomedical businesses can thrive, especially in close proximity to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. It’s also home to the historic Alabama, Carver and Lyric theaters, which have been or will be restored. The area is also home to more and more restaurants.

• The Loft/Design District (in red), where most of the loft developments have been centered, and more creative and design businesses, such as architects, graphic artists, lawyers and other businesses tend to cluster.

• The Civic Center District (in purple), where the proposed expanded Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex (a.k.a. “domed stadium”) will also feature an entertainment district with shops and restaurants for Downtown workers as well as out-of-town visitors. Several new federal buildings are already under construction in the area.

The Master Plan also calls for taking down Interstate 20/59, which acts as a barrier between the BJCC district and the rest of Downtown. Putting it in a below-surface roadway would allow the creation of a landscaped, pedestrian connection between the Museum of Art and the BJCC district.

The four major districts could be tied together through landscaped “green streets,” major thoroughfares in the City (including one-way streets that have been turned into two-way streets) such as Sixth Avenue North, 14th Street, 20th Street. These streets would connect to other key green streets in the surrounding City Center neighborhoods.

At the center of the plan is the proposed Railroad Reservation Park. A group of citizens has been dreaming, and working, to turn the industrial area from 14th Street on the west to Sloss Furnaces in the east into a premier park not only for the City, but the region.

“The green streets touch all those areas, and the Railroad Reservation Park is the gem in the middle,” says Carter.

What’s the B.I.G. Idea in Charlotte?

by Vickii Howell

Photos Courtesy C. Dennis Lathem. All Rights Reserved

Last fall, the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce took more than 100 business, political and civic leaders to Charlotte in its annual jaunt to see how their counterparts in other cities work.

The idea behind B.I.G. (Birmingham Innovation Group) is to help leaders here think outside the box and learn from what its peer cities are doing to solve problems like those facing the Magic City and its surrounding areas.

Out of all the cities visited so far in the chamber trips, Charlotte is most like Birmingham.

I have to admit, though, it was kind of tough coming back home.

Charlotte is a nice town.

It’s clean as a whistle (I looked in vain for litter along its streets).

It has a huge, new sports stadium where its football team, the Carolina Panthers, play. Its downtown is filling up with lofts and apartments, most of them built near a new rail line.

Its new affordable homes in the “poor” areas of town were cute clapboard and brick bungalows with classic front porches. None were cookie-cutter duplicates. Several of its public housing communities were being razed and rebuilt with marvelous replacements for low-income families.

Its suburbs – which are actually in the city limits through annexation – are attracting new business, bringing jobs and talented employees who demand a high quality of life.

Ten years ago, North Carolina’s biggest city looked more like Birmingham. But like other Southern cities, Charlotte has pulled ahead of the Magic City. It is one of the country’s largest banking center, an airline hub, and a place that retains and recruits the best and brightest of young professionals and entrepreneurs who live, work, play and stay in Charlotte.

So you’d think our leaders who went to assess the strengths of a sister southern city would be green with envy, jealous that it is moving ahead of the Magic City, like other cities have done.

Not really.

At the end of three days, everyone gathered in a room to discuss what we saw and heard. Most everyone reached a similar conclusion: Birmingham has its own its strengths and can become every bit a player with Charlotte and other cities that are striving to win new business and residents.

For instance, Charlotte doesn't have something like the University of Alabama at Birmingham, with its enviable world-class research and medical facilities.

It doesn’t have as strong a base of bio-tech businesses and health care centers as Birmingham does.

But we said Birmingham must capitalize on these and other strengths.

If the Magic City is ever to catch up to and surpass Charlotte – and any other comparable city that’s leaving us in the dust – then leaders here should keep in mind some of Charlotte’s key principles:

Have a vision.

Charlotte has a clear sense of what it wants to be – a banking center, a research center, a world-class city of choice for diverse peoples. Its leaders set high standards, confident that Charlotte can compete with any city on the planet, not just those in the South or the U.S.

Have a plan.

Every major project or initiative in Charlotte, it seems, is part of some long-range plan worked out 25 years in the past, or some plan that goes 25 years into the future. Leaders there not only plan their work, but work their plans – hard.

Work cooperatively.

Every major plan or initiative in Charlotte comes as the result of various entities in the city and the region working together as a team to assess and solve problems – from reviving blighted neighborhoods, to coordinating hospitality industries, to building stadiums and transit systems. The leaders of North Carolina’s major urban areas even lobby their state Legislature as one body, speaking with one voice.

Create positive peer pressure.

Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory said every new business owner who comes to town gets a friendly welcome. Then they’re told to roll up their sleeves and go to work on some worthwhile community project. Saying no is not an option, unless you want to be shunned at society parties, he said. Everybody is expected to do their part to make Charlotte a livable city.

Build strong public/private sector partnerships.

The City of Charlotte can’t pay for every worthy project that comes down the pike. Businesses gladly pitch in to help when they can because they know what’s good for the city is good for business. And vice versa.

Brand and market your image.

Charlotte knows who it is and isn’t afraid to tell the world how great it is. Leaders speak with one voice about Charlotte’s great quality of life – its job opportunities, its sports franchises, its arts and cultural amenities, its revitalization efforts, its business-friendly environment.

Never say never.

It seems that people in Charlotte face every challenge and difficulty with a “Can-Do Attitude." Nothing is so hard or impossible that some solution can’t be found, or negotiations can’t reach some sort of consensus. And they keep working to find solutions, even if it takes years.

Embrace the CAVEs.

Not everyone in Charlotte sings from the same hymnal. The naysayers (“Citizens Against Virtually Everything”) stir up plenty of controversy over new taxes and things like that. But people who favor progress in Charlotte find ways to take what is constructive in their criticism, then work around the CAVEs to get things done.

Those who went on the B.I.G. trip came back fired up.

On his return to Birmingham, Jefferson County Commissioner Larry Langford immediately stirred things up when he proposed moving the “domed stadium” to another location and advocated a street car system, like Charlotte has. And he insisted that Wachovia Bank – since it’s taking over SouthTrust – plunk down serious dollars on the stadium project and other community projects in Birmingham.

His ideas seemed rash to some, but at least he got people moving and shaking again.

Since the trip, leaders are talking more about regional cooperation – in areas as varied as roads, rivers and buses – and about plans for downtown and neighborhood revitalization. And the talks seem more productive.

Let’s hope the enthusiasm generated by the chamber's B.I.G. idea leads them to create a greater vision for the Magic City and move toward it, together.