Birmingham Lights Birmingham Southside District A Walking Tour of Five Points South - Continued
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A Walking Tour of Five Points South

Previously:  Walking Tour of  Five Points South

Dian Apartments,1300 20th Street South, 1914, Harry Wheelock. Leo Steiner built this apartment house and named it after his wife Dian. Designed with Tudor Revival decorative features, it incorporates such period touches as trefoil motifs in the window bays, arrow slits in the masonry,and four centered arches with limestone caps.

Haskins Williams House, 1312, 20th Street South,c 1901, Joseph C. Turner. Home of prominent local industrialist Haskins Willliams, this is a well preserved example of a turn of the century house showing both Victorian and Colonial Revival elements in its design. Interior features include period light fixtures, fine woodwork and a stained glass window.

Williams Garages, on Cobb Lane, 1919. After Emily Williams got her first car in 1919, her father Haskins built these garages. Spaces not housing Williams cars were rented to neighbors whose houses had been built before automobiles came on the scene. Emily used the rental income as gasoline money for her new Dodge sedan. Constructed of rubble-stone, its four bays were bricked in the 1970s to allow for commercial use.

Levert Apartments, (Cobb Lane), 1318 20th Street South, c 1909, Wheelack, Joy & Wheelock. Built by the Levert family of New Orleans, this is an elegant example of the neighborhood's early apartment houses, this one with Craftsman design elements. Consisting of two long and narrow sections with a connecting bridge part-way back, hte buildings notable features include the terra cotta ornamental on the first storey cornice, colorful glazed tile designs in the walls, and half timbered windows bays. The building is perhaps best known at the rear, where it has housed the popular local restaurant Cobb Lane, opened by Virginia Cobb in 1959 and still operating.

Lathrop House, 1923 14th Avenue South, 1901( probably William C. Weston). One of the grandest examples of the Classical Revival style in the city, this was the home that prominent lumberman Frank Lathrop built for his bride, Sallie Camer Lathrop, daughter of around-the -corner neighbor Alabama Governor Braxton Bragg Comer. (Note the Lathrope name incised on the lap top)  Consistent with the subsequent fortune of many of its neighbors to be altered for professional ( mostly medical) offices, this house was used as physicians' offices from 1947 to 1976. It sat abandoned and deteriorating for many years until its restoration in the early 1990s.

Robinson McCay House, 1900 14th Avenue South, 1892. Another of surviving Highland era houses, built for a mining and rail road -building company officer whose widow continued to live there until 1951. Designed in a late Victorian style with transitional Classical features, much of its exterior was obscured in a mid century conversion to physicians' offices. it was restored in 1994 -95 for the Oasis Women's Center. The apartments at the rear were built by the Robinsons in 1914 in what had been their back yard.

Continue the Walking Tour of Five Points South