USA: Alabama, Birmingham – Vulcan Park

🗿 Vulcan Watches Over Birmingham — Iron, History, and Herding Children

We pushed further south into Alabama today, heading towards Montgomery, the state capital, but decided to make a detour through Birmingham along the way. Not the proper Birmingham, obviously — the one with the Bullring and decent curry houses — but Alabama’s version, which has been trying to live up to the name in its own particular way for the past century and a half.

Birmingham, Alabama was founded in 1871, right at the junction of two railway lines, in a spot that happened to sit atop enormous deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone — essentially everything you need to make steel, all within a few miles of each other. The city grew at a frankly alarming pace, earning itself the nickname “The Magic City” because it appeared to spring up almost overnight. By the early twentieth century it was the industrial powerhouse of the American South, its furnaces running day and night, its skyline permanently smudged with the particular brand of productive filth that Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic considered a sign of progress. The iron and steel industry dominated for decades, right through two world wars, before the familiar story of deindustrialisation set in during the latter half of the twentieth century and left the city having to work out what it wanted to be when it grew up. The answer, it turns out, involved a significant pivot towards medicine and biomedical research — the University of Alabama at Birmingham is now one of the leading medical research institutions in the country. From smelting iron to transplanting kidneys. Good effort, Birmingham.

The thing that had caught our eye, though, and made us swing off the interstate, was Vulcan Park.

The park itself sits on Red Mountain, which rises about 300 feet above the city and runs in a long ridge roughly east to west — a geological feature that is, in a rather pleasing piece of historical symmetry, the very same iron ore seam that made Birmingham wealthy in the first place. The mountain’s red-tinged soil, rich in haematite, gave the ridge its name and gave the city its reason for existing. Standing up there, looking out across the sprawl of modern Birmingham below, you got a genuine sense of why the Victorians who founded this place thought they’d struck lucky. They had, rather.

The park covers around ten acres on the summit of the ridge and is, in the way of American municipal parks, considerably better maintained than you might expect. There are walking trails through the surrounding woodland, open green spaces, picnic areas, and a terrace that wraps around the base of Vulcan’s pedestal with what are, on a clear day, genuinely impressive views across the city and well beyond. On a less clear day — and Alabama in summer has a habit of producing a thick, soupy haze that sits over everything like a warm flannel — you can still make out enough to get the general idea.

Vulcan himself — the Roman god of fire, the forge, and general metalwork-related divinity — stands 56 feet tall on top of a 126-foot sandstone pedestal, looking out over the city with the slightly self-satisfied expression of someone who knows he is the largest cast-iron statue in the world. Which he is, and has been since he was cast in 1904. The statue was commissioned by the Birmingham Commercial Club to represent the city at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition — the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, the same fair that introduced the American public to the ice cream cone and the hot dog bun, though Vulcan was arguably more impressive than either. He was built by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, cast in sections at a Birmingham foundry, and then shipped up to St. Louis in pieces like a very heavy flat-pack. He weighs, if you’re interested, around 100,000 pounds — which is approximately the same as seven double-decker buses, though considerably less useful for getting across town.

After the fair, Vulcan came home to Birmingham, spent an embarrassing few decades in various states of neglect — including a period at the state fairgrounds where he apparently had a pickle jar in his raised hand as part of some promotional arrangement, which seems undignified for a god — before eventually being properly installed on his current hilltop perch in 1939. A further major restoration took place between 1999 and 2004, during which the statue was dismantled, inspected, repaired, and reassembled with considerably more care and attention than it had received in the intervening sixty years. The restoration cost around nine million dollars, which is a lot of money for a statue, but then he is rather large. He looks remarkably good for something made entirely of iron and well over a century old.

One detail worth knowing, since it is the sort of thing that sticks in the memory: Vulcan’s torch, which he holds aloft in his right hand, was for many years used as a rather blunt public safety announcement. It glowed green when Birmingham’s roads had been accident-free for the previous day, and red when someone had been killed in a traffic accident. A Roman god moonlighting as a road safety indicator. The tradition was discontinued after the 2004 restoration — presumably someone decided it was a bit on the nose — and the torch now simply illuminates the skyline at night without editorial comment.

An observation platform sits inside the pedestal itself, accessible by lift or stairs, and gives you a 360-degree view from roughly the level of Vulcan’s knees — which, given he is standing on a 126-foot column, puts you at a considerable height above the city. We went up. It was, predictably, very high, and the views were excellent, and Jack pretended not to be bothered by the height in the particular way that teenage boys pretend not to be bothered by things that are clearly bothering them.

The grounds around the statue include a museum that tells the story of Birmingham from its industrial origins, through the grinding years of the Great Depression, and into its complicated and often painful role in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Birmingham was, it has to be said, not on the right side of history during that period — it was the site of some of the most violent resistance to desegregation, including the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, in which four young girls were killed. The museum doesn’t shy away from any of that, which is to its considerable credit.

What we hadn’t entirely banked on was arriving to find the car park half-full of school buses. Dozens of children, all apparently fuelled entirely by packed lunches and the collective energy of people who have been told not to run and are absolutely going to run. Fortunately, it was the lunch hour, which meant they were temporarily occupied with their sandwiches, and we were able to nip in and get round the exhibits without being swept away. Small mercies.

I do feel a certain low-grade guilt about Jack and Emily, whom we continue to haul around museums with the cheerful determination of people who are convinced this is good for them. To their enormous credit, they don’t complain nearly as much as I probably would have at their age — but left entirely to their own devices they would be through any museum in approximately eight minutes, pausing only to look at anything with a button to press. We had to station ourselves at various exhibits and physically point at information panels until they’d actually read them, which felt less like cultural enrichment and more like a particularly low-stakes hostage negotiation.

The museum, it turned out, was well worth the effort. It had only opened in June — just a few weeks before our visit — so it still had that rather wonderful new-museum quality about it, and the displays hadn’t yet been fingerprinted, leaned on, or generally subjected to the loving punishment that the public inflicts on these things over time. Small but very well put together, with enough genuine historical weight to make the dragging-of-children entirely justifiable.

Vulcan, for his part, continued to gaze out over his city from his hilltop, entirely unmoved by any of it.