How Birmingham's Steel Money Built a Mountain of Mansions Above Its Own Smoke: Redmont

Around 1950, on the roof of a five story stone castle on the crest of Red Mountain, a man put up a television antenna. There would not be a television broadcast in Birmingham for another twenty years. He built it anyway. That castle is in Redmont, the neighborhood where the men who built Birmingham out of iron and coal and fire came to live, two hundred feet directly above the valley their own furnaces filled with smoke. It is the one rich neighborhood in America where you can stand in the mansions, look straight down, and see the exact source of the money. The steel barons made the fastest fortunes in the history of the South up here, and some of them lost those fortunes just as fast. The castle builder was foreclosed and bankrupt. The coal baron who built a Tudor mansion one room thick for the mountain breeze ran mining towns that met their workers with gunfire. This is the story of the barons of the Magic City, the trophy houses they built above their own smoke, and how quickly a fortune made from fire can disappear. 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 Redmont Birmingham, Swann Castle, Theodore Swann, DeBardeleben, steel barons, Magic City, Red Mountain, Robert Jemison, Birmingham mansions, iron and steel history.