Vestavia Hills, Alabama: Place Apart

Vestavia Hills, Alabama: A Place Apart. By Marvin Yeomans Whiting. Vestavia Hills: Vestavia Hills Historical Society, 2000. xvii, 334 pp. Available from Vestavia Hills Historical Society, 1112 Montgomery Highway, Vestavia Hills, AL 35216 for $25.00 plus $3.00 shipping and handling.

Over the past half-century historians, urban planners, architects, social commentators, and filmmakers have examined the growth and impact of American suburbs. Beginning with John Keats's The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston, 1956), most of these studies have attacked suburbs as intellectual and social dead zones. Recent studies such as The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 (New York, 1999), by Ray Suarez, and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York, 2000), by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, continue this interpretation. The 1999 film American Beauty portrays suburban society as a place of dysfunctional families, adulterous wives, emasculated men, and hopeless adolescents. The impact of suburban sprawl even appeared, briefly, as an issue in the 2000 presidential campaign.

But despite the disapproval of the learned, millions of Americans move into suburbs each year, often draining older cities of population and revenue. Farmland, small towns, and historic sites are obliterated to make way for wider highways, strip malls, and subdivisions. Given the strong scholarly, artistic, and political interest in surburbanization, we should welcome local studies like Vestavia Hills, Alabama. These local studies provide an opportunity to examine the impact of suburbs and the rationale for their existence.

Founded as a planned community on Shades Mountain overlooking Birmingham, Vestavia Hills was incorporated in 1950 and has grown to a city of twenty-five thousand residents. The city takes its name from the house built on Shades Mountain in the 1920s by former Birmingham mayor George Ward. Inspired by the design of Roman temples, Ward's "Vestavia" was a two-story round structure with Doric columns. The grounds featured temple-shaped doghouses and pools on which Ward floated models of Roman ships. Ward's famous parties sometimes featured the daughters of Birmingham's elite dancing barefoot in togas and African American servants dressed as Roman soldiers.

Vestavia Hills Baptist Church demolished the house in 1971, but it is perhaps appropriate that the city of Vestavia takes its name from George Ward's home. As Ward sought to create his own world atop Shades Mountain, so, too, the early developers of the city sought "to find 'a place apart,' a place possessed of natural beauty but also a place that was secure in its distance from the City of Birmingham, away from the troubles that were breaking upon the metropolitan area in Jones Valley" (p. 20). What developed over the next half century is in many ways a typical American suburb with strip malls and other commercial establishments extending along both sides of a highway. Residential subdivisions radiate out from the business district.

The Vestavia Hills Historical Society should be credited for commissinning Marvin Yeomans Whiting, a professional archivist and historian, to author this work. Whiting balances the interests of general readers with those of scholars, discussing local personalities, clubs, and sports, but also using city-council minutes to explore the evolution of the city government and census data to examine the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the community. The inclusion of several appendices, including a chronology of significant events in the city's history and lists of mayors and other public officials, will make the book especially useful to librarians and students.

JAMES L. BAGGETT

Birmingham Public Library Archives

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 2002
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