Exploring Montgomery

The storytelling continues… a collection of stories and photos from Exploring Montgomery!

CH Lions — Here are the familiar Capitol Heights Lions . . . which flank Madison Terrace at its intersection with Madison Avenue. Capitol Heights was incorporated in 1909 as a suburb with a population of 12,000. Such growth was made possible by the extension of the streetcar line way out to Electric Park […]

Capitol Heights Lions

Furlong Hall — The campus green at St James School on the Vaughn Road looked awfully vacant last summer when I took this, but school has now started and the place teems with young people. My view looks at Furlong Hall, one not seen by the casual passers-by. STJ moved to this campus […]

Furlong Hall

Louis Whitfield House — Louis B Whitfield Jr’s modern style residence at 2080 Allendale Road was built circa 1930, about the time the road was opened. As a young man, Junior faced the daunting task of following in his father’s footsteps. The Senior Whitfield had started the ALAGA Syrup Company in 1906, and subsequently […]

Louis B Whitfield Jr. House

Doctor Blue House — The Doctors Blue House . . . That’s what I named it, because Dr John H Blue and Dr George Blue both lived here in the early part of the 1900s, descendants of the Henry Blue family, subjects of Ms Neeley’s recent publication, “The Works of Matthew Blue”. I could […]

Doctors Blue House

The artistic concept of a pair of reclining lions, one on guard and one resting, supposedly originated as part of an elaborate tomb for Pope Clement VIII in 1783. Over the next century the lions were replicated worldwide, and these became known as the “Vatican Lions”. Today Montgomery can boast […]

Knox Hall Lions

Officers Quarters — This is a 3-star general’s housing in the Senior Officer’s Quarters Section at Maxwell. It represents one of several designs that were employed when some 100 such units were built at the Base in the early 1930s, funded during the Depression as one of many such appropriations FDR used in […]

Senior Officer’s Quarters

Goldwater Sweep — This Frank Lockwood design at 3230 Thomas Avenue was built ca 1930 by Alphonse Levy, who was founder and president of the highly regarded Al Levy’s, a ladies apparel store on Montgomery Street downtown. The house is a good example of Lockwood’s penchant for “drunken brickwork”, and lends veracity to […]

Goldwater Sweep

Samuel Schloss House — at 3233 Thomas Avenue was built circa 1938 by Sam Schloss Sr and his wife Amelia. Sam so admired the house across the street (built about 8 years previously) that he hired Frank Lockwood (who had designed the other house) to draw up its mirror image for him. This is […]

Samuel Schloss House

Lewis House — This house has been cited as one of Montgomery’s finest examples of the California Bungalow/ Craftsman Style residence. Sadly, the present owners are allowing the lines and details to be obscured by vegetation. Nonetheless, behind the distinctive triple gable, the house boasts 11-foot ceilings, a basement, decorative rafter ends, and […]

Lewis House

Prado — Oh, this is so sad . . . the last vestige of The Prado. You are looking at what has to be two of the four survivors of some forty (?) buildings that made up the grand apartment complex that so proudly stood on the SW corner of Fairview and […]

The Prado

GWTN Mansion — I just knew this impressive GWTW Mansion at 3245 Thomas Avenue had a story to tell, but I just couldn’t find it. I knew it was the home of RR Equip mogul Royce Kershaw in 1946, and five years later it was the dwelling of William Thames, founder of Thames […]

GWTN Mansion

Algernon Blair House — Blair built it in 1904 for his wife Carolyne. She and their three children had just left Macon GA to join him in Montgomery where Blair had found success as a building contractor. But Carolyne died the very next year, and while Algernon remarried a few years later (into the […]

Algernon Blair House

SPLC — The Southern Poverty Law Center and its Civil Rights Memorial, located on the corner of Washington and Hull. Morris founded it in 1971, using his share of the Fuller & Dees cookbook killing, and it soon stirred up a wrath. Morris Dees and his Center was bombed along about 1982, […]

Southern Poverty Law Center

Brantwood — It is the first thing past Oakwood Cemetery, sitting on a hill so high it looks down on the cemetery. The home was established in 1917 by the Federation of Women’s Clubs, but for its first 40-odd years it was known as the Children’s Protective Home. The Home’s current quarters […]

Brantwood Children’s Home

Belvoir Mansion — at 3250 Thomas Avenue, was built in the mid-1920s, when Thomas was little more than a country lane. The large estate is surrounded by an intimidating wall, and the structure appears to be a blending of Washington’s neo-classical Georgian Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson’s penchant for Palladian style. In French, […]

Belvoir Mansion

Upchurch Residence — AKA Monticello lives on, at 2233 Woodley Road was built by Ken Upchurch Sr to fulfill a lifelong ambition. Ken founded Upchurch Construction Co in 1930, a venture that still exists today, carried on by Ken Jr, and now Ken III. Ken Sr spent 30 years planning and dreaming about […]

Upchurch Residence

Shoppes Mulberry — This quaint little row of specialty shops sort of rose up by mutation over the last thirty years or so, and now the “Mulberry District” is a favorite place. It surely does represent American free enterprise at its best. At one time this land was part of A P Tyson […]

Shoppes at Mulberry

Ben Moore — The once fine Ben Moore Hotel . . . located at 902 High Street (where it intersects with South Jackson), was built in 1952 near the center of Centennial Hill, the prestigious Black business district and neighborhood of that era. It was still new in 1954, when Martin Luther King […]

Ben Moore Hotel

Crump Center — Oh, the irony of it all. A couple years ago the Crump Center, a City-operated redoubt for the Still-Agile-Elderly, was moved from its former smallish Elizabethan Style home on Highland Avenue, way out onto Federal (now Congressman Dickinson) Drive, past the Coliseum. Today the center holds forth in this huge, […]

Crump Center

Hillcrest — the one-time home of the Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs. The Federation purchased the former residence of Judge William Hill in the late 1960s, and for at least 35 years it used the facility to stage weddings, receptions, luncheons, teas and meetings. Garden parties amidst the lush landscaping were a […]

Hillcrest

Alcazar Shrine Temple — was built in 1973, and it facilitated the relocation of the Alcazar Shrine from Madison Avenue (opposite Cramton Bowl). The Shriners is a fun-loving fraternity (no connection to Islam) founded some 120 years ago as a branch of the Masonic Order. Early on it adopted Arabian themes to herald it […]

Alcazar Shrine Temple

Bear Lumber — at 25 East Jefferson, where it has been ensconced for some 65 years. Rough-and-tumble T. L. Bear started it in the mid-1930s as a general building contractor, but in the early days he was frowned upon by the grand old-time contractors of the day. To fix that, “TL” got himself […]

Bear Lumber

Downtown Post Office — on Catoma Street sits directly opposite the Davis Building on the site of the old Davis Motor Co (whose mechanic wrecked my Pontiac in 1953, when he took it from the shop to run a personal errand). This was built in 1977, during the Carter Administration, when our “real Post […]

Downtown Post Office

Sage Blockhouse — The 4-story reinforced concrete blockhouse . . . at Gunter Annex was constructed in 1957 as part of a hush-hush AF system which was to provide early warning of a Soviet nuclear attack. Us citizens were sure this facility would lead the Soviets to target Montgomery if they decided to attack. […]

Sage Blockhouse

Meadhaven — an adjunct of Baptist Hospital South, built in 1962 from a generous contribution of Arthur Mead. Initially it was a 40-bed nursing home; a decade later it was converted to hospital use, still later to psychiatric beds. Today its grand porch for rocking chairs has been filled in, its lawns […]

Meadhaven

Morningview — During the Depression years our Board of Education bore much criticism for the “extravagant castles” (Lanier and Capitol Heights JrHi) it had built during the Roaring Twenties. Ergo, even before WW II had started, a no-nonsense contractor, T L Bear, had been elected to the Board. Soon after the war […]

Morningview Elementary

Davis Building — now part of the Troy University Montgomery campus. It was built by mogul Horace Davis circa 1959, when his Davis Motor Co (Pontiacs & Cadillac’s) held forth directly across the street, and its prime first floor tenant was GMAC. For two decades, this structure held the home offices of the […]

Davis Building