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Thomas Jefferson Hotel

1929 establishments in AlabamaHotel buildings completed in 1929Hotels established in 1929Neoclassical architecture in AlabamaSkyscraper hotels in Birmingham, Alabama
Leer Tower, Birmingham, AL
Leer Tower, Birmingham, AL

Thomas Jefferson Tower, originally the Thomas Jefferson Hotel and then the Cabana Hotel, is a 19-story building on the western side of downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It was completed in 1929 as the 350-room Thomas Jefferson Hotel and is at 1623 2nd Avenue North. It has a tower in its roof intended to be a zeppelin mooring mast.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Thomas Jefferson Hotel (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Thomas Jefferson Hotel
2nd Avenue North, Birmingham

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Latitude Longitude
N 33.5128 ° E -86.81069 °
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Thomas Jefferson Hotel

2nd Avenue North 1623
35203 Birmingham
Alabama, United States
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Leer Tower, Birmingham, AL
Leer Tower, Birmingham, AL
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McWane Science Center
McWane Science Center

The McWane Science Center (formerly known as the McWane Center) is a science museum and research archive located in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, United States. The state-of-the-art science center, aquarium, and 280-seat IMAX Dome Theater is housed in the historic and refurbished Loveman's department store building. It opened to the public on July 11, 1998. On the lower level, the World of Water exhibit showcases more than 50 species of marine and freshwater aquatic life. There is a touch tank with different species of small sharks and rays. There are also shark teeth that can be observed under a microscope and different displays about water pollution. The Alabama Collections Center (on the second floor) is the home of more than 500,000 items from the former Red Mountain Museum and Discovery Place. The center houses precious minerals, fossils, and Native American artifacts, the most noteworthy including the world's fourth-largest collection of mosasaurs; the Appalachiosaurus (similar to Tyrannosaurus); and the state fossil of Alabama, the Basilosaurus cetoides (an 80-foot (24 m) fossil whale). For smaller children there is the Itty Bitty Magic City exhibit (on the second floor), featuring a climbing structure, a water play area, an area specifically for toddlers, and an area with smaller versions of common buildings in a city. The model buildings are all made to help younger children learn skills, or to connect with their parents. One example is a model grocery store where children can learn about the main food groups while "shopping" with their parents. The exhibit opened on May 16, 2015, and was a remodeling of an older early childhood play place with the same name previously located on the third floor.The McWane Science Center is named after the McWane family and McWane, Inc., both of which helped fund the center.

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Kelly Ingram Park
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Kelly Ingram Park, formerly West Park, is a 4 acres (1.6 ha) park located in Birmingham, Alabama. It is bounded by 16th and 17th Streets and 5th and 6th Avenues North in the Birmingham Civil Rights District. The park, just outside the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church, served as a central staging ground for large-scale demonstrations during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Reverend James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference directed the organized protest by students in 1963 which centered on Kelly Ingram Park. It was here, during the first week of May 1963, that Birmingham police and firemen, under orders from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, confronted the student demonstrators, almost all of them children and high school students, first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images from those confrontations, broadcast internationally, spurred a public outcry which turned the nation's attention to the struggle for racial equality. The demonstrations in Birmingham brought city leaders to agree to an end of public segregation and helped to ensure the writing and then the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The park was named in 1932 for local firefighter Osmond Kelly Ingram, who was the first sailor in the United States Navy to be killed in World War I. In 1992 it was completely renovated and rededicated as "A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation" to coincide with the opening of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, an interpretive museum and research center, which adjoins the park to the west. The park is the setting for several pieces of sculpture related to the civil rights movement. There is a central fountain and commemorative statues of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and some of the other heroes of the civil rights movement, as well as three installations by artist James Drake which flank a circular "Freedom Walk". They bring the visitor inside the portrayals of terror and sorrow of the 1963 confrontations. A limestone sculpture by Raymond Kaskey depicts three ministers, John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith, and A. D. King, kneeling in prayer. The Four Spirits sculpture was unveiled at Kelly Ingram Park on September, 2013 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Crafted in Berkeley, California by Birmingham-born sculptor Elizabeth MacQueen and designed as a memorial to the four girls killed in the bombing (which occurred on September 15, 1963), it depicts the four girls in preparation for the church sermon at the 16th Street Baptist Church in the moments immediately before the explosion. The youngest girl killed in the explosion (Carol Denise McNair) is depicted releasing six doves into the air as she stands tiptoed and barefooted upon a bench as another barefooted girl (Addie Mae Collins) is depicted kneeling upon the bench, affixing a dress sash to McNair; a third girl (Cynthia Wesley) is depicted sitting upon the bench alongside McNair and Collins with a book in her lap. The book depicts the refrain of William Butler Yeats poem "The Stolen Child". The fourth girl (Carole Robertson) is depicted standing and smiling as she motions the other three girls to attend their church sermon. At the base of the sculpture is an inscription of the name of the sermon the four girls were to attend prior to the bombing—"A Love that Forgives." Oval photographs and brief biographies of the four girls killed in the explosion, the most seriously injured survivor (Sarah Collins), and the two teenage boys shot to death later that day also adorn the base of the sculpture.Additional monuments honor Pauline Fletcher, Carrie A. Tuggle, Ruth Jackson, Arthur Shores, Julius Ellsberry, and the "foot soldiers" and other "unsung heroes" of the Civil Rights Movement. The park hosts several local family festivals and cultural and entertainment events throughout the year. The Civil Rights Institute provides audio-tour guides for the park which feature remembrances by many of the figures directly involved in the confrontations. Urban Impact, Inc. also provides guided tours by appointment.