By day as well as by night
the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the
downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are
streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean--the reason
for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed
from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into
the very center of Atlanta's business and shopping district.
Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of
Georgia. The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of
the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even
squares. From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy,
graceful grades into the hills to the southward. Because of these
grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills,
and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the
lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is
reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon--which
is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in
the United States.
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.
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