View of downtown Birmingham, Ala.(Photo courtesy of the author)

I asked around, and people here do love the governor!

But seriously, though.

The name has fallen out of fashion, but Birmingham, Ala., was once dubbed "The Magic City" for its explosive industrial growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its earth yielded a rich mixture of coal, iron ore, and limestone — everything a city needs to make iron and steel. Birmingham was long dominated by the industry, whose workers lived in company houses and played one another on corporate baseball teams. Like nearly all factory towns, Birmingham began to shrink in the mid-20th century as America could acquire ...

National Review

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