Commercial

Advertiser Plant
located adjacent to the Intermodal Deck on Molton. The Advertiser, predecessor of which was founded in 1829, is today only a cog in the Gannett media chain. But it had a proud and illustrious history. It claims to have been the leading newspaper of the Confederate States. The paper has […]

Advertiser Plant

 in Commercial  tagged advertiser
Hilltop Arms
High above the City at 600 Montgomery Street was probably built with much pride about 1950. I actually worked there in a first floor office for a few months in 1954. Today it is a failed, abandoned blight which looms over our downtown. All its windows are broken out, no […]

Hilltop Arms

 in Commercial  tagged arms / hilltop
Eastbrook
Looking at the flea market image on Coliseum Boulevard, you would never suspect that long ago this modest strip-mall was East Montgomery’s answer to the mighty Normandale Shopping Center on the South side of town. Birmingham’s Loveman’s Department Store anchored Normandale, so the Montgomery Fair, our homegrown version, became the […]

Eastbrook Shopping Center

 in Commercial  tagged eastbrook / mall / shopping
Steiners-Lobman 1
…stands at the corner of Commerce and Tallapoosa. By 1900, lower Commerce had become the wholesale center of central Alabama. The wide street was paved with Belgian granite ballast blocks. It was an impressive street, and the most impressive building on it was the 1891 Steiner-Lobman wholesale dry goods building. […]

Steiner-Lobman Building

 in Commercial  tagged coffin / lobman / steiner
777 S Lawrence
is directly behind the ”Y” on Lawrence Street.  It was built with great pride in 1964, back when it had only two floors and an open court at its center. The design won an AIA Regional Honor Award. It became the center of a 3-building complex that we grandly called […]

777 South Lawrence

 in Commercial  tagged 777 / lawrence
Downtown YMCA
on South Perry just South of I-85, was built in 1963 and represented a giant step for the Montgomery “Y”, which was then only 15 years old. Back then this was a neighborhood facility, male only, which also accommodated the business community. Today this center is adult only, and because […]

Downtown YMCA

 in Commercial  tagged downtown / ymca
Jeff Davis Hotel
Located on Montgomery Street, it was our convention center in 1969. That year the Gulf States Region of the A.I.A. met in Montgomery for its semiannual gathering. The hotel had recently added two stacked banquet halls by enclosing the space between itself and the adjacent Sheppard Building. Wonderful accommodations. At […]

Jefferson Davis Hotel

 in Commercial  tagged hotel / jefferson davis
Green Lantern
It’s at the corner of Carter Hill and McGehee Roads and where I banked. Back as far as the “Roaring 20s”, out on the outskirts of town, there was this notorious dive called the Green Lantern on this site. It was “gangster built”, dark inside, had a dance floor, served platter-sized steaks. […]

Green Lantern Branch Bank

 in Commercial  tagged bank / dining / green / lantern
In 1928 this was the site of a small “Great A&P Tea Co” grocery store, maybe in this very building. A decade later the A&P had built a much grander store directly across Hull Street, and this little structure had become the Hull Street Market. Their new owner, Rubin Hanan, struggled […]

Penny Profit Food Store

 in Commercial  tagged grocery / store
Montgomery Zoo
is located at 2301 Coliseum Parkway out in Chisolm, probably on land that was one time a part of the Kilby reservation. It was founded as part of Oak Park in 1920; declared to be the Montgomery Zoo in 1935, and moved to this 48-acre site in Chisolm in 1974. […]

Montgomery Zoo

 in Commercial / Education  tagged zoo
Alfa ins 1
on Southern Boulevard, directly opposite Baptist Hospital South.  The company was founded in 1946 by the Alabama Farmer’s Federation, which was started itself in 1921 to serve the political, social, insurance and agri-business needs of its members. ALFA primarily sells casualty insurance, but is also involved in real estate, construction, […]

ALFA Insurance Headquarters

 in Commercial  tagged alfa / insurance
…on East Boulevard is the CBS affiliate for South Central Alabama, with remote studios in Selma, Troy and Greenville. The station was started in 1960 as an ABC outlet in Selma by my one-time neighbors, the Brennan Brothers of Big-BAM fame. But after two decades of repeated sale of its […]

WAKA TV Studio

 in Commercial  tagged cbs / tv / waka
Bell Building
…has towered over Montgomery Street for 100 years now. Newton Bell, whose dream it was, died during the construction, but his son, N J Bell Jr, saw it to completion, and his son N J III managed the property until the late 1960s. The building was actually U-shaped, having had […]

Bell Building

 in Commercial  tagged bell / historic registry