Broadway Street

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Broadway (labeled as Broadway Street on some maps) is an approximately 1.4-mile residential street in Homewood, connecting the Edgewood Business District on Oxmoor Road with Green Springs Highway. The road runs in a predominantly north-south direction.

Although a two-lane street, Broadway is wider than most surrounding streets because it was originally part of the Birmingham and Edgewood Electric Railway's streetcar route in the 1910s and 1920s. The streetcar stopped running prior to World War II and during the war a project was begun to salvage the tracks as scrap. Doing so proved financially prohibitive, so the tracks remained and were paved over in 1968 when the road was resurfaced.

The southern end of Broadway, just south of Saulter Road, originally took a sharper turn to a route slightly north of the current route and then curved into Columbiana Road (that section of which later became part of Green Springs Highway). In the 1960s, this section of Broadway was straightened to provide a right-angle intersection with Green Springs, leaving a dead-end fork that provided access to Lakeshore Apartments. This dead-end segment remained until the construction of Broadway Park Condominiums around 2005, when the developer bought the 1.3-acre parcel between the apartments and the current Broadway from the city.

Notable locations

For an alphabetical list of locations, see the Broadway Street category.

References

  • Summe, Sheryl Spradling. (2001). Homewood: The Life of a City. Homewood, AL: Friends of the Homewood Public Library.
  • Atchison, Ray M. and Doris Teague Atchison. (1999). Light in the Valley. Dawson Memorial Baptist Church. Chapter 1 available online, accessed April 2, 2010.