How Birmingham's First Fortune Built a Boulevard of Mansions and Then Abandoned It: Highland Avenue

A hundred years ago there were dozens of grand Queen Anne mansions lining the finest street in Birmingham, Alabama. Today, in the entire city, there are exactly two of them left. And both of them stand on the same street. That street is Highland Avenue, Birmingham's first grand address, the curving boulevard the money climbed to when it fled the smoke of the valley. It opened with the first steam streetcar in the South. The iron men and the merchants and the doctors built towered Victorian mansions up and down it, and for twenty years it was the most prestigious place to live in the state. Then the money found somewhere better, and left, and kept leaving, climbing higher up the mountain decade after decade. Highland Avenue was simply the thing they left behind. This is the story of the forgotten first boulevard of a boomtown, the two mansions that refused to fall, and how a street loses everything so quietly that nobody writes down what was lost. CHAPTERS (added after upload) Subscribe for more lost history like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-9o1jfKyaASz4am9yTtxNA More Alabama stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4UGAVyqmTg&list=PLKZr9z2MwI-8&pp=0gcJCbwFa94AFGB0sAgC Highland Avenue Birmingham, Bradshaw House, Hassinger mansion, Birmingham history, Magic City, Queen Anne mansions, Elyton Land Company, dummy line streetcar, Red Mountain, lost mansions, Gilded Age Alabama.