On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, a handful of porches along Highland Avenue will open to strangers. There will be live music on some of them, light refreshments on others, and docents standing by to explain the architecture of houses that most Birmingham residents have only ever admired from the sidewalk. The occasion is the third annual "It's Nice to Have You in Highland Park," a porch crawl that runs from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, October 18, 2026, and finishes with an after party at Rojo.
The event is free and open to the public, rain or shine, and it is deliberately unstructured. Organizers describe it as a choose-your-own-adventure tour: visitors pick up a map, then wander the neighborhood's stops in whatever order they like. Historic or other costumes are encouraged, which gives the afternoon a slightly theatrical air.
The name is a riff on a phrase with real local history behind it. "It's Nice to Live in Birmingham" was the title of a compilation of articles first printed in April 1960 by The Birmingham News and Birmingham Post Herald, part of a civic campaign intended to counteract adverse national publicity about civil rights issues in the city. The campaign began by encouraging the public to tell positive stories about the city during what Tutwiler Hotel head Ira Patton called "Operation Hospitality." The Historical Society notes the irony plainly: the message was opposed by approximately 40 percent of Birmingham's population, who were at that time demonstrating for equal access to the law and public facilities. The porch crawl's title borrows the old booster slogan and turns it toward a neighborhood rather than a city, and the Historical Society is one of the event's beneficiaries.
Highland Park itself is one of Birmingham's oldest neighborhoods, developed as a suburb by the Elyton Land Company roughly two miles south of downtown. It sits at the base of Red Mountain, hilly and wooded, with homes and apartment buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries standing alongside newer condominiums. Highland Avenue, the neighborhood's main boulevard, was laid out in the late 19th century and was once served by streetcars running in both directions into downtown.
The neighborhood's parks have an origin story that surprises many people who use them. Rhodes, Caldwell and Rushton Parks were not designed as parks at all; they began as ravines. As Birmingham Historical Society director Marjorie White has explained, railroad engineers laying streetcar tracks along the side of Red Mountain chose to hug the hillside rather than undertake expensive cuts and fills, and in doing so left three ravines undeveloped. When the Lakeview amusement park closed around 1902 and its property was leased to the Birmingham Country Club, residential lots were platted along Highland Avenue. Around that time Mayor George Ward acquired the leftover ravines and declared them parks. They remain the green spine of the neighborhood today, and two of them, Rushton and Rhodes, will host vendors during the crawl.
This year's route threads through some of the neighborhood's most interesting buildings. Faraway Theatre at 1211 27th Place South is a stop, as are the Warner House at 2733 Highland Avenue and the Harris House at 2731, both currently undergoing renovations and both open for interior tours during the event, with visitors invited to learn about their histories and their futures. The Enslen House at 2737 Highland Avenue opens its front porch for live music and conversation about the building's history and architecture. The courtyard at Highland Terrace, 2819 Highland Avenue, will have refreshments and music from Jimmy and Laine. The Birmingham Historical Society hosts a historical scavenger hunt, and the Donnelly House, Greenbriar at the Altamont, Independent Presbyterian Church and Alabama Audubon are among the other participating organizations.
Around Rushton and Rhodes Parks, local vendors will set up, including Mario's Ice Cream Truck and Blue LadyBug Face Painting. Several businesses and nonprofits along the route will be on hand to talk about their missions and upcoming programming, which gives the crawl a second purpose beyond sightseeing: it functions as a low-key introduction to the institutions that operate in the neighborhood.
At 5 p.m., the wandering ends and the gathering begins at Rojo, where live music and free chips and salsa are on the agenda for anyone who wants to sit and stay a while.
Proceeds from the day benefit three organizations: Friends of Highland Park, the Birmingham Historical Society, and Alabama Audubon. The event is supported by sponsors, and the neighborhood association is still recruiting volunteers and sponsors ahead of the date.
The Highland Park Neighborhood Association organizes the crawl. All residents of the neighborhood are members of the association, which meets on the second Tuesday of each month at the Highland Golf Course Clubhouse. The first porch crawl was held in 2024, when the association partnered with local nonprofits, businesses and neighbors to produce what it called an "open neighborhood" event. It returned in October 2025 for a second year, and now a third.
The premise has stayed consistent: for two hours on one Sunday, the private becomes briefly public. Porches are, by design, the threshold between a house and a street, and a porch crawl is an invitation to stand on that threshold and look around. In a neighborhood with five National Historic Districts within its boundaries, that is a lot of thresholds worth crossing.