The Homewood Centennial Story Doesn't Start in 1926

Homewood's official birthday lands on October 29, exactly one hundred years after the city incorporated as the first "over-the-mountain" city in the Birmingham area. The city has built a real calendar around that date: a gala, a brunch, a picnic, a time capsule. But the detail that actually explains what this year is about sits five years earlier and a few blocks off Oxmoor Road, in a pink stucco house that was already hosting artists, writers, and at least one aviation pioneer before Homewood existed as a legal entity at all.

That gap between 1921 and 1926 is the whole story. The city is turning 100. The culture that made it worth incorporating got there first.

A hundred years, officially

The anchor weekend of Homewood's centennial runs October 15 through 17. It opens with the Centennial Gala at Rosewood Hall, branded "Old Homewood Glam," with a red-carpet cocktail hour and historic storytelling built into the program. Sponsorships and VIP tables went on sale first, with general tickets opening to the public back in July, and proceeds are earmarked for a specific, visitable project: the Centennial Transformation of Miss Sims' Garden, a plan to turn the space into a more accessible public gathering spot downtown. That's a useful detail if you're wondering what a centennial gala actually pays for. This one pays for a garden you'll be able to walk through afterward.

The following morning brings the Centennial Brunch at the Homewood Rec Center, and Sunday shifts to a picnic and festival with live entertainment in Central Park. The whole run closes on October 29 itself with a time capsule burial at the Homewood Public Library, timed to the exact date the city was incorporated a century ago.

That's the official spine. It's well-funded, well-publicized, and worth attending. It's also not where the interesting part of this story lives.

Five years older than the city it's celebrating

Walk to the corner of Roseland Drive and Edgewood Boulevard and you'll find the Pink House, built in 1921 by artists Eleanor and Georges Bridges on land her father gave the couple as a wedding present. That father was Richard Massey, one of Birmingham's 1871 founders and the man credited with coining the city's nickname, "The Magic City." Eleanor and Georges spent the better part of three decades running the house as something between a studio, a school, and a salon, mentoring hundreds of artists and hosting the kind of Sunday-evening gatherings that eventually seeded what is now the Virginia Samford Theatre. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald reportedly passed through. Eleanor's boarding-school roommate was Amelia Earhart.

None of that required a city charter. Homewood didn't formally exist yet when the Bridges started building the artistic infrastructure the city would later claim as part of its identity. By the time incorporation happened in 1926, the Pink House was already five years into being exactly the kind of cultural landmark a hundredth anniversary is supposed to celebrate.

The house nearly didn't make it to see this centennial at all. After Eleanor's death in 1987 and a series of ownership changes, a developer received planning-commission approval in June 2018 to demolish it and build five new homes on the 2.5-acre lot. A local preservation campaign spent more than a year raising money and public pressure, and in September 2019 the Ellis family bought the property with plans to restore it as a private residence and art studio, a process that continues today. The house that predates Homewood's government by five years came within a planning-commission vote of not making it to the government's hundredth birthday.

That's worth sitting with if you're trying to figure out what actually gives this year its weight. It isn't the gala. It's that the city is, in a real sense, still cleaning up around and celebrating the same creative instinct that built it before anyone made it official.

The small stuff got there first too

The pattern from the Pink House, quiet local energy running ahead of the official program, shows up again in how this centennial year has actually unfolded so far.

Back in April, a free outdoor Yacht Rock concert downtown kicked off what the city is calling its Centennial concert series, built around 1970s and '80s hits rather than a formal ribbon-cutting. In May, We Love Homewood Day, the city's longest-running community festival, renamed its signature race for the occasion. Parks and recreation superintendent Rusty Holley put it simply: organizers "changed the name of the 5K this year to The Run of the Century." Parade participants and performing groups were asked to build something Homewood-specific into their routines for the year, an instruction that came from the festival's own organizers rather than city hall.

The city also opened a running campaign this spring inviting owners of houses built more than a century ago to add their homes to a new centennial history map, complete with a yard sign. As of this spring, about twenty houses had joined the list, according to Mayor Jennifer Andress, a small but growing catalog of the architecture that quietly predates the city government by decades in some cases, echoing the Pink House's own timeline.

And in late June, residents ran a parallel fundraiser called Star Spangled Homewood, a $25 donation and yard-sign campaign supporting the Homewood Police Foundation, the Homewood Fire Foundation, and the Homewood Patriot Band, paired with a neighborhood decorating contest judged the first week of July. It was pitched explicitly as marking both Homewood's centennial and the nation's 250th, two anniversaries residents folded into one summer without much fanfare.

None of this needed the October calendar to happen. It happened anyway, all year, because the instinct to mark the occasion locally didn't wait for the official program.

What's actually on the calendar this fall

If you're trying to plan around all of this, here's the sequence that matters between now and Halloween.

The Homewood Makers and Music Market sets up at The Edge on September 13, a smaller, closer-in event if you want a preview of the centennial mood without waiting for the big weekend. The Centennial Film Festival follows at Patriot Park on October 4. Neither is officially billed as one of the year's headline events, but both land inside the same stretch that's carrying the rest of the celebration.

Then the anchor weekend runs October 15 through 17: the Old Homewood Glam Gala at Rosewood Hall, the Centennial Brunch at the Rec Center, and the picnic and festival in Central Park. The Time Capsule Burial at the Public Library on October 29 closes the loop exactly a hundred years after the city's incorporation date.

Layered against all of that is the Homewood Chamber's Centennial edition of its magazine and a Visit Homewood Centennial Map Guide highlighting local shopping, dining, and lodging for anyone treating the year as a reason to explore parts of town they usually skip.

The number that actually matters

Homewood wants you to notice it's turning 100. Fair enough, that's a real milestone and the calendar backing it up is substantial. But the number worth carrying into October isn't 100. It's 5, the gap between when Eleanor and Georges Bridges started building something worth celebrating on Edgewood Boulevard and when the city got around to making it official. Everything grassroots that's happened this year, from a renamed 5K to a yard-sign campaign to a house map with twenty entries and counting, follows the same pattern. The city is good at throwing the party. The neighborhood was already living the reason for it.

If you've lived in Homewood long enough to remember the fight to save the Pink House, or you're new enough that this is the first time you've heard its name, Homes With Yolanda would love to hear which piece of this year's calendar you're most looking forward to. We track these details because knowing a place this well is the job, not because we're asking for anything in return. Let's Connect.