Beneath your feet runs a half-mile ribbon of green, cut through downtown Birmingham in 2016. Beneath your feet the trail runs along First Avenue South from 20th Street to 24th Street, a simple ribbon of green that opened in 2016. The Birmingham Rotary Club funded most of it in honor of their centennial, committing $2.5 million in 2013 to transform a railroad cut into a pedestrian greenspace.
The City of Birmingham added $2 million from a 2012 federal TIGER grant for drainage, streetscape, and infrastructure, and additional funding came from the Freshwater Land Trust, the Jefferson County Department of Health, and the University of Alabama. At the entrance rises a 46-foot-tall sign that reads "Rotary Trail in the Magic City," modeled after the historical "Birmingham the Magic City" sign that once stood here. Walk slowly and you can imagine that rail cut becoming a people-friendly corridor connecting two very different downtown anchors: the 19-acre Railroad Park on one side and Sloss Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark, on the other.
The 46-foot sign reads Rotary Trail in the Magic City, and the path beneath it runs toward Railroad Park one way and Sloss Furnaces the other.