Look up at the corner of 20th Street and 1st Avenue North, once promoted as the Heaviest Corner on Earth. In the early 20th century Birmingham celebrated the nearly simultaneous rise of four of the tallest buildings in the South: the 10-story Woodward Building (1902), the 16-story Brown Marx Building (1906), the 16-story Empire Building (1909), and the 21-story American Trust and Savings Bank Building (1912). An announcement of the last tower appeared in the Jemison Magazine in a January 1911 article titled "Birmingham to Have the Heaviest Corner in the South," and over the years that phrase stretched into the popular, improbable slogan you hear now.
Pause to imagine how those new heights reshaped this intersection. A marker, erected May 23, 1985 by the Birmingham Historical Society with cooperation from Operation New Birmingham, stands on the sidewalk outside the Empire Building and describes the quartet. The four buildings were later recognized on the National Register of Historic Places—three listed individually in 1982 and 1983, and the group listed as a historic district on July 11, 1985.
Find the Woodward, the Brown Marx, the Empire, and the American Trust and Savings Bank Building rising at each corner of this intersection.