Also, so that people don’t get confused, I think it’s important to emphasize that the specific 1920s Olmsted plan is not being implemented now in B’ham. (If that were the case, we’d now be removing the airport and Brookwood Mall for green space.) Various greenway projects physically overlap with some of the proposed Olmsted parks, but that’s about it. Some of the plan’s overriding concepts (and spirit, as I mentioned above), such as preserving mountaintops, are being realized in Red Mountain Park and Ruffner Mountain, but those were never in the Olmsted plan. Nothing wrong with that–parks are amenities wherever they’re built–but I think it’s a point to keep in mind.

In some cases, as was the case in Birmingham, the city fathers chose to implement only what they thought was important and necessary for the bottom line, whether from the Olmsteds’ plan or the original plan by Warren Manning. We at least took some suggestions from the proposals, leading to the tradition that Barry speaks of (including the parks along Highland Avenue).

Many of the cities that hired the Olmsted brothers never even did that. So I’d have to say that Birmingham does indeed have a tradition that allows us to install the plan nowadays, even though the reasons for our ability to do so may not be so thrilling to look back on.

I don’t know that I would call it a “tradition,” since the park board never acted on most of the Olmsted plan for Birmingham in the 1920s; the very few pieces of it that did come to pass were the result of private development. The “tradition” is only about 10-15 years old, when the greenway projects came into being. The beautiful thing is that many of the current park/greenway projects will help bring about many aspects of the Olmsted plan–not always in the same spaces they marked off, but in the same spirit for sure.