Here’s an interesting, obscure, fun fact for when Bank Independent completes its newly-announced 225 Holmes Avenue building in Downtown Huntsville, Alabama.
You may be aware of ‘The Heaviest Corner on Earth’; the corner of 1st Avenue N and 20th Street in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the corner that has buildings of 10, 14, 16, and 19 stories, mostly built in the 30s and 40s it would appear from the architectural styles. No other corner is so ’heavy’ in Birmingham as that one, even though there are taller buildings downtown.
When I worked as a research biologist at UAB years ago, I got to know downtown Birmingham very well as I would often catch the Crosstown South #9 bus near that corner. Many really big cities easily dwarf this corner, but that moniker has remained, I think because in a much bigger city, what would be the point? There would be so many corners with tall buildings on all four corners that the curiosity factor would be very watered-down. Plus, the human scale would have been long ago lost with the extreme tallness.
Here in Huntsville, we have no ‘Heaviest Corner’, as no place really has four buildings of even moderate height to add up, until now. B’ham’s corner adds up to 59 stories; our fledgling corner of Holmes & Greene would add up to 29 stories as follows:
- Times Building: 12 stories
- 301 Holmes 7 stories (actually just 6 on the very corner, but we’ll go with 7 here)
- Greene Street Parking Deck: 5 stories
- 225 Holmes: 5 stories
Total of 29 stories.
Note also how different each building is, with a new parking deck, a relatively new apartment building, a new office building and an historical ‘skyscraper’.
Well, not much, but it is a valid curiosity anyway, as ‘The Heaviest Corner in Huntsville’!
Phill Gibson 