Birmingham, Alabama

Birmingham, Alabama

Attractions

Landmarks

• Alabama Theatre
• Arlington House
• Legion Field
• Rickwood Field, built in 1910, America's oldest standing baseball park. Website
• Kelly Ingram Park, site of notable civil rights protests and adjacent to historic 16th Street Baptist Church
• Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. Website
• Vulcan, (featuring the god Vulcan at his forge) the largest cast iron statue in the world which was first cast for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, and displayed on top of Red Mountain in 1938.
• WTTO Tower a 2000 ft / 609.6 m tall guyed mast communication tower. (one of the tallest in the world.)
• Oak Mountain State Park is about 10 miles South of Birmingham. It is one of the southernmost wrinkles in the Appalachian chain, and a scenic drive to the top provides views reminiscent of the Great Smokey further north.

Major attractions

• Barber Motorsports Park is a $40 million motorsports complex that includes a 2.3 mile (3.64 km) long track built to MotoGP specifications and a spacious museum housing George Barber's world class collection of motorcycles and racing cars. The park currently hosts Superbike and Sports Car Grand Am races.
• The Birmingham Botanical Gardens is a 67-acre (270,000 m²) park displaying a wide variety of plants in interpretive gardens, including formal rose gardens, tropical greenhouses, and a large Japanese Garden. The facility also includes a white-tablecloth restaurant, meeting rooms, and an extensive reference library.
• The Birmingham Zoo is a large regional zoo with more than 700 animals and a recently-opened interactive children's zoo.
• The Riverchase Galleria mall hosts more than 200 retail stores, a five-star hotel, and an office tower under the largest skylight in the world in the suburb of Hoover. The anchors are JCPenney, Parisian, Proffitt's, Macy's, and Sears.
• The Talladega Superspeedway, located east of Birmingham, is home to two of NASCAR circuit's annual races in April and October. The speedway also has a Motorsports Hall of Fame museum.
• Visionland is an amusement park with two independent sections: Splash Beach Waterpark and Magic Adventure Theme Park,. The theme park has 25 different thrill rides including The Rampage wooden roller coaster and Zoomerang, a steel roller coaster purchased in 2004 from the Brisbane expo.
• The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, a world-famous development of high-caliber public golf courses throughout Alabama, includes two championship courses and a an 18-hole short course in Oxmoor Valley just south of Birmingham.
• McWane Center is a science center and IMAX Dome Theater located downtown with state-of-the-art permanent and traveling educational exhibits.

Annual major events

• CityStages is a world-renowned music festival that occurs around Birmingham's Linn Park on Father's Day weekend, that offers 3 days of music from all genres on 11 stages.
• Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival is considered the third largest film festival in the US behind Sundance and Tribeca. It brings filmmakers from all over the world to Birmingham to have their films viewed and judged. This festival usually occurs on the last weekend in September at eight venues around downtown, but is more concentrated around the Alabama Theatre.
• The Mercedes Marathon is a 10-k and 5-k road race that takes place on the 1st or 2nd Sunday in February that was started in 2002.
• The Southern Heritage Festival is an event with a second chance at life. It began the 1960s as a music, arts, and entertainment festival for the African-American community in Birmingham, but ceased to exist by the early 1990s. It was replaced by the now-defunct Birmingham Heritage Festival, which was basically an all-music festival that targeted mostly younger demographics. But in July 2004, the Southern Heritage Festival was revived with a new name, The Original Southern Heritage Festival. This festival offers three days of music, culture, and arts. The first day of the festival is Hip Hop Night, the second day is Classic R&B and Old School night, and the third day is Gospel. This festival takes place on the Alabama State Fair Grounds at its Fair Park on the first weekend of September.
• "Aaron's 499 & EA Sports 500" are two NASCAR circuit races that occurs in April and October at the Talladega Superspeedway, and bring a major boost to the area's economy.
• Do Dah Day is an annual pet parade held around the end of April.