Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly wooded golf links, above the road.
Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road, which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building. The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial equivalent for autumn haze.
Birmingham—The thin veil of smoke from far-off iron furnaces softens the city's serrated outlines
At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the mineral rights of mining companies.
The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of "cutting in" at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger—realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind—Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.
Birmingham practices unremittingly the pestilential habit of "cutting in" at dances