You Can't Take It With You...

Pepper Place. Park Place. One Federal Place. These are more than places or street addresses, they are guideposts on the path to making the city a more vital, vibrant and alive place. And they all bear the mark of Cathy Crenshaw and her company Sloss Real Estate. With the purchase and renovation of an abandoned Dr. Pepper syrup plant, Crenshaw turned a once blighted area into a vibrant mixed-use district widely recognized as the premiere design center in the Birmingham area. Her company also acted as co-developer of Park Place, Birmingham’s first HOPE VI project. Expanding the project from the original six city blocks of demolished public housing to a twelve block master-planned area, Crenshaw worked to add the new Philips School, a YMCA youth development center, an organic urban farm/community garden, and is currently working to renovate Marconi Park. Park Place is a truly mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood.

An active member of the Urban Land Institute, she has served on the Inner City Council and on the steering committee for LOCUS in partnership with Transportation for America, a national organization working to improve mass transit and integrated transportation. She is responsible for creating and managing the Pepper Place Farmers’ Market, a nationally-recognized public market and participated on the Farmers’ Market Advisory Board for the Ford Foundation.

Crenshaw attended Harvard University in 2007 and 2008, first as a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design and then as a visiting scholar. She studied innovative models for mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhoods and is interested in building green neighborhoods and cities through the preservation and creation of urban trees and urban forests; she also promotes the role farmers’ markets can play in the preservation of small family farms, the revitalization of urban centers, and the health of communities and low-income citizens. Her project as a visiting scholar focused on building healthy cities.
Here is what she misses when she is not in Birmingham.

Pepper Place Market
“Just as you might suspect, I seldom miss the Saturday market. But when I do it is one thing about Birmingham I really, really miss. There is nothing else quite like it.”

Birmingham Jazz
“I always miss the music of this place, the jazz born from the amazing skills of Fess Whatley. I miss the Jazz Hall of Fame. There is a reason that the music coming out of this city is so amazing. Billie Holiday would only hire jazz musicians trained by Fess Whatley. That tradition still continues every Saturday morning at the Jazz Hall of Fame where they have jazz classes for kids. I love going to Ona’s Music Room and just listening. It is the sound of the city to me.”

History
“I love that Birmingham changed the world during the Civil Rights Movement. I can still talk to Fred Shuttlesworth, Colonel Stone Johnson, James Armstrong. These men are living legends. History is alive and well in Birmingham and you can’t experience that in other places, so when I am not here I miss that immediate sense of living history.”

Fresh Food
“The food in Birmingham’s greatest restaurants is so totally connected to our farmers. When I eat a tomato salad, I know where that tomato came from. The connection between table and farm is quite unique, and we have that in abundance in this city.”

Trees
“We are an official Tree City and we have many more beautiful amazing trees compared to most other cities. Recently, a friend and I made a pledge to plant 100 trees by December 31st in the city center and surrounding neighborhoods. If I could think of one aspect of nature that has always made this city special it is the trees. And we need to keep planting for future generations. I even have a More Trees Please button I wear.”

Skyline
“I can see it all from my office window. What I love is that back in the 1970s, we had the sense to build decks instead of surface parking lots—which kept a dense rich building fabric in the City Center. We saved these beautiful, old buildings, which we need to keep saving. We have one of the finest collections of terra cotta buildings in the United States. They are a national treasure we must protect.”

A Cup of Coffee
“I love drinking coffee on the sidewalk tables in front of O Kafés! Coffee House. I spend time there with everyone from my son, Arthur, to Civil Rights Institute founder Odessa Woolfolk to farmers like Donnie Tomlin. It is my second office.”