Walk east from Rhodes Park after supper in August and the avenue tells you something the guidebooks haven't caught up to. The median is planted and quiet. The porches are lit. The Vesta corner has foot traffic on a Tuesday. The parade that once ran down this street on the third Saturday in May didn't happen here this year, and yet the block feels busier than it did five summers ago.
That is the story worth telling residents right now. The signature event moved off the avenue. Daily life on the avenue got denser. If you already live between Five Points South and the golf course, the rhythm of your week has quietly reorganized around three new anchors, and it is worth knowing what changed.
The Parade Left. The Avenue Filled In.
For most of its run, Do Dah Day belonged to Highland Avenue. The annual pet parade, music festival and fund-raiser began in 1979, conceived at a meeting of friends at Dugan's to fill a need for a spring festival, and it was held on Highland Avenue and in Caldwell and Rhodes Parks. A first parade of about thirty-five participants grew into a Saturday tradition that pulled tens of thousands of people onto the median for a single afternoon.
That format has been paused. The 2026 event ran on Saturday, May 16 at Cahaba Brewing Company, and reporting from the transition year confirmed that the parade would not happen and the festival would be held at Cahaba Brewing instead. The charity still runs. The Highland Avenue procession does not. For residents who used to plan the third weekend of May around barricades on their own street, this is the practical change: your block is your block again in May, and if you want the festival you drive to Avondale.
What replaced the parade day is not a single event. It is a denser weekday.
The New Address At 2173
The most concrete change on the avenue in the past year is a coffee shop with a specific street number. Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee opened at the Vesta development on Highland Avenue, located at 2173 Highland Avenue South, offering specialty coffee, espresso drinks, pastries, and space designed for casual visitors and people looking for somewhere to work, meet, or network.
Two things matter about that address for people who already live nearby. The first is category. Highland Avenue has long had a coffee anchor in O'Henry's, but the Vesta space is a different kind of room, sized to hold a laptop crowd and a stroller crowd at the same time. The company's model emphasizes direct relationships with coffee farming cooperatives rather than commodity buying, which gives the shop a story to tell beyond the cup. The second is what it signals about the ground floor of Vesta itself. A residential building the size of Cortland Vesta needed a daytime tenant that would put people back on the sidewalk in front of it. Now it has one, and the north side of Highland between 21st and 22nd feels different at ten in the morning than it did two summers ago.
Rojo Runs The Week
If Vesta is what changed, Rojo is what stayed. The Highland Avenue restaurant has been running the neighborhood's weekly calendar for so long that it functions as a de facto community bulletin board. The specifics, straight from the neighborhood association's own listings:
- 10% Tuesdays. On almost every Tuesday, 10% of sales from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. goes to a local charity, whether you dine in, take out, or order delivery.
- Pub Quiz Wednesdays. Trivia starts at 7:15 p.m., the winning team gets a $120 Rojo gift card, and it fills up early enough that you need to arrive well before start.
- Late weekend bar. The bar is open late Friday and Saturday, and the kitchen takes late orders if you sit down by 10 p.m.
Rojo is one of the oldest trivia nights in Birmingham, going back to 2008.
That last detail is the one worth holding onto. A trivia night that has run continuously since 2008 is not an event. It is a piece of neighborhood infrastructure. If you have lived here for less than a year, you have not yet clocked how much of the block plans around Wednesday at 7:15.
The Three-Park Loop
The park blocks are Highland Park's most legible amenity, and they are not interchangeable. Each does one thing better than the others, and residents who use them well tend to specialize.
| Park | What it's for | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Caldwell | Bigger crowds, staged programming | Located at 26th Street South and Highland Avenue next to the Virginia Samford Theatre, named for Dr. Henry Martyn Caldwell, who gave Highland Avenue its name and led the Elyton Land Company from 1875 to 1895. Site of the annual Do Dah Day and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra's Summer Series, and extensively renovated in 2006. |
| Rhodes | Quieter, dogs, weekday lunch | At 28th Street South and Highland Avenue, named for Rufus Napoleon Rhodes, founder of what is now The Birmingham News, and the first neighborhood park to be restored through a public-private partnership. |
| Rushton | Weekend workouts, neighborhood volunteer days | The medians here anchor the recurring Median Weeding mornings the association organizes, most recently the 9 to 11 a.m. session by the Independent Presbyterian Church parking lot, with free chips and salsa at Rojo for participants afterward. |
The naming lineage is not trivia. Highland Avenue was constructed by the Elyton Land Company to provide access to its wooded property on South Highlands, and Henry M. Caldwell, president of the company, suggested the name. When you walk from Caldwell to Rhodes on a Saturday morning you are walking through two parks named for two men who built the street you live on. Most residents I meet don't know that. It changes the way you look at the median.
When The Sun Goes Down
Late-summer evenings on Highland run on three institutions that residents undersubscribe.
Virginia Samford Theatre. Sits directly next to Caldwell Park. Its productions rotate through the season and are the reason you occasionally see a small dressed-up crowd walking east on Highland at 6:45 on a Thursday. If you have not looked at the season calendar this year, look.
Galley & Garden. Located on Highland Avenue in the historic white-columned Merritt House, restored and renovated, with white interiors, a marble-topped bar, wine cellar, and private dining event spaces. The room has been recognized on Wine Enthusiast's 100 Best Wine Restaurants in America list and has earned Wine Spectator's Best Award of Excellence. For residents, it is the walk-to option for a birthday dinner that does not require a Mountain Brook reservation.
Highland Park Golf Course. The public course at the east end of the avenue is more used by neighbors than most realize. It is centrally located near downtown, a relatively short course with marked elevation changes and some fairways that are fairly tight while others are quite wide, and it has a golf shop, an on-site grill, and many nearby dining choices. The late-summer twilight rate is the single most under-used amenity in this ZIP code.
What A Resident's Week Actually Looks Like
Put together, the calendar shapes up like this. Not a checklist, not a top-ten, just how the week reads if you use the block the way people who have lived here a decade use it.
- Tuesday, 6 p.m. Dinner at Rojo, because 10% of the tab is going to a local group anyway.
- Wednesday, 7 p.m. Walk over for trivia. Get there before 7:15 or you sit at the bar.
- Thursday morning. Coffee at 2173 Highland if you need a room to work in, O'Henry's if you want a familiar face.
- Friday evening. Twilight nine at Highland Park Golf, then walk-in seats at the Samford or a table at Galley & Garden.
- Saturday morning. Rhodes Park with the dog, or a volunteer hour on the Rushton median if the association is organizing one.
- Sunday. The porches take over. That is the whole plan.
Nothing on that list requires driving. That is the underrated feature of the park blocks. Highland Park is one of 99 neighborhoods within the City of Birmingham, located just a few miles southeast of the city center, with more than 6,000 residents living in single-family homes, apartments, and condominiums, and five National Historic Districts within its boundaries that together form the Highland Park Local Historic District. A five-block radius around the median contains a coffee shop that opened last year, a restaurant with a twenty-year-old trivia night, a symphony venue, an award-listed wine restaurant, a public golf course, and three parks named after the people who drew the street grid. Residents who use two of those anchors are doing well. Residents who use four are the ones the newcomers keep asking for recommendations.
If you have lived on the park blocks for years and are starting to think about what your house is worth in the current market, or if you are helping a friend or family member figure out where they belong in Birmingham, Hannah Sells Birmingham is happy to walk you through it in the same patient, block-by-block way this post is written. Request a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready.
