The Heaviest Corner on Earth is a promotional name given to the corner of 20th Street and 1st Avenue North in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, in the early 20th century. The name reflected the nearly simultaneous appearance of four of the tallest buildings in the South, the 10-story Woodward Building (1902), 16-story Brown Marx Building (1906), 16-story Empire Building (1909), and the 21-story American Trust and Savings Bank Building (1912).
The announcement of the last building was made in the Jemison Magazine in a January 1911 article titled "Birmingham to Have the Heaviest Corner in the South". Over the years, that claim was inflated to the improbable "Heaviest Corner on Earth", which remains a popular name for the grouping.
A marker, erected on May 23, 1985 by the Birmingham Historical Society, with cooperation from Operation New Birmingham, stands on the sidewalk outside the Empire Building describing the group. The buildings have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Woodward Building was listed on June 30, 1983; the building on the southeastern corner of the intersection, now named the "First National-John A. Hand Building," on September 29, 1983; and the remaining buildings, on July 11, 1985.
Famous quotes containing the words heaviest, corner and/or earth:
“Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
“I used to join the murmurings about “Where are the qualified women?” As we murmured, we would all gaze about the room, up toward the chandelier, into the corner behind the potted palm, under the napkin, hoping perhaps that qualified women would pop out like leprechauns.”
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 5 (1980)
“I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)