By Charles Gaines, Jeff Book | June/July 2009 | City Portrait

The Big Heart of Birmingham

Why Alabama's biggest city is loaded with small-town charm

The Locals

Good Citizens
By Jeff Book

Five Birminghamians who have helped shape a growing city

Chris & Idie Hastings
Chefs/Restaurateurs

The lanky chef traces his culinary roots to boyhood summers at his grandmother’s house on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, when the family would feast on farm-stand produce and the crabs and fish he’d pluck from the salt marsh. After opening Hot and Hot Fish Club in 1995, he and his wife, Idie, an accomplished pastry chef, cofounded Birmingham Originals, which promotes local independent restaurants and the farm-to-table connection. “For great food you need great products,” he says, noting with pride the increase in local sources for everything from heirloom pork and goat cheese to wild-foraged watercress, mushrooms, and berries. His favorite way to decompress remains fishing and hunting with good friends and dogs—and ending each day by feasting on the bounty.

Cathy Crenshaw
Developer/Urban Planner

As a daughter of one of the city’s first families, Crenshaw (née Sloss) could have bowed to the status quo. Instead, her company, Sloss Real Estate (founded by her grandfather in 1920), has invested to make Birmingham a more dynamic city, an alternative to suburban sprawl. Now, after a year at Harvard as a Loeb Fellow and another as a visiting scholar, she’s applying green-design standards to Sloss’s buildings and working to enhance Birmingham with better transit (from more bike lanes to modern streetcars), increased parkland, and more. “The good news is we didn’t tear down many of our old buildings,” she says. “Birmingham has this embarrassment of riches—the historic fabric, great food, art, natural beauty. We have to do a better job of tying it all together.”

Alan Hunter
Media Maven

As one of MTV’s original VJs in the 1980s, Hunter got a crash course in music and media. After years in New York, then L.A., working on TV pilots and other projects, he came back to his hometown. In the mid-1990s, with his three brothers he turned an old warehouse on 23nd Street South into WorkPlay, a multipurpose entertainment center. “This is the kind of town where you can do something a little crazy and people will support you,” he observes. WorkPlay contains a lively bar and office space for media-related companies, including Hunter Films, run by Alan and his brother Hugh. But most come here for live music, presented in an intimate club setting with a large stage. Hunter, who also cofounded the annual Sidewalk Film Festival, says, “Birmingham has a lot of creative potential just waiting to be tapped.”

Edwin Marty
Farmer/Teacher

Three years as a garden writer at Southern Living gave Edwin Marty local credibility when he started Jones Valley Urban Farm. But the Birmingham native had already studied urban farming at the University of Oregon and toiled in fields from New Zealand to Baja California. Dedicated to sustainable agriculture and education, Jones Valley first planted on scattered vacant lots but now occupies a city block at 7th Avenue North and 25th Street, 3½ acres hemmed in by downtown buildings and a busy expressway. Above an open-air classroom, a butterfly roof equipped with solar panels captures rainwater; tractors run on biodiesel. Marty and company focus on high-value crops like arugula and basil, sold to restaurants and at farmers’ markets to fund such programs as Seed 2 Plate, which teaches children about produce and nutrition, and Growing Together, which promotes community gardens (like the one Jones Valley offers for downtowners). “We teach people not only how to grow their own food but how to eat better,” Marty says. “Buy and eat local food, and you get fresher, better flavor and keep more of your dollars in the community.”