Walk down toward the Flora Johnston Nature Preserve trailhead on Elder Street this week and you'll find a finished trail. The asphalt is down. The landscaping is in. According to the Crestline Park Neighborhood Association, the only thing left is the ceremony, and the city is holding that for a cooler afternoon.
The Crestline Greenway is physically finished, though it has not been declared open. It's ready for a Saturday morning run in every way that matters. If the rest of the Red Rock Trail System is any guide, the practical and official openings may not land on the same day.
What "Finished" Actually Means Here
The project started under a duller name: the City of Birmingham Shades Creek Greenway. It's since been renamed the Crestline Greenway, and the 1.3-mile route runs parallel to Shades Creek through the heart of the neighborhood. District 2 Councilor Hunter Williams has spearheaded the project in partnership with the Freshwater Land Trust, and in October 2025 the Birmingham City Council approved a $500,000 agreement between the city and the land trust to move construction forward. At that point the trail was still an active job site. Councilor Williams told a local news crew at the time that the city had asked people not to run or ride their bikes or push strollers on it yet.
That was a year ago. The neighborhood association's own update this fall describes a different state of the project: paving done, landscaping in, ribbon-cutting planned once the weather cools. The gap between those two points, from active construction site to finished trail waiting on a ceremony, is the actual news here. If you've been driving past the Elder Street trailhead for a year assuming it's still a work zone, it isn't anymore.
Where the Trail Actually Goes
The Crestline Greenway isn't a loop that starts and ends in the same parking lot. It runs from the Flora Johnston Nature Preserve trailhead at Elder Street to Groover Drive and Shiloh Drive, and from there, trail users can pick up the existing sidewalks along Stone River Road and Shiloh Drive to reach the Irondale Furnace Trail in Mountain Brook. That's the connection that matters for anyone who already treats the neighborhood as a walking or running base. The Crestline Greenway isn't a standalone amenity. It's the missing link in a route that already existed on both ends and simply couldn't be walked or biked straight through.
That link is also part of something considerably larger. The trail falls under the Red Rock Trail System, the county-wide network that Jefferson County has been building out corridor by corridor for years, with a long-term goal of a 36-mile connected loop tying together parks and neighborhoods across the metro. Crestline Park's segment is one piece of that loop, and it happens to be, by the trust's own account late last year, the piece most likely to finish first among the projects then in the pipeline.
A short list of what that connection actually looks like on the ground:
- Southern end: Flora Johnston Nature Preserve trailhead, Elder Street
- Northern end: Groover Drive and Shiloh Drive
- Sidewalk connector: Stone River Road and Shiloh Drive to the Irondale Furnace Trail
- Surface: paved asphalt, open to walking, running, biking, and non-motorized mobility devices
- Parking: none added as part of the project
That last point is worth flagging for anyone planning to drive in from outside the neighborhood. This trail is built for people who are already close enough to walk to it.
The Furnace at the Other End
There's a detail in the trail's northern connection that a lot of people will walk past without noticing. The Irondale Furnace Trail, the route this greenway ties into once it reaches Mountain Brook, begins alongside the Furnace Creek tributary at the site of the old McElwain Furnace before following Shades Creek toward Old Leeds Road.
Crestline Park has its own McElwain reference, and it predates the furnace connection by nobody's memory. The neighborhood association lists ongoing restoration of McElwain Cemetery, established in 1875, as one of its active preservation projects, tied to documentation of the area's mining heritage. Whether the cemetery and the furnace share a direct historical thread or simply a name that outlasted the industry itself, the coincidence sits right at the two ends of the same trail. A greenway meant for evening runs turns out to connect two markers of the same 19th-century iron economy that shaped this stretch of Jefferson County long before it was anyone's neighborhood.
What the Ribbon Is Actually Waiting On
Waiting for an official opening isn't the same as waiting for the trail to be usable, and the Red Rock system has a recent precedent for exactly that gap. When Homewood cut the ribbon on its own 1.4-mile Shades Creek Greenway extension in January 2025, the mayor at the time noted the informal reality on the ground before the ceremony ever happened.
As Bham Now reported, Homewood's mayor said, "Rumor has it, the trail has been 'open' for a while."
That was Homewood's segment, not Crestline's, and the two are different construction jobs on the same broader creek system. Crestline's own ceremony is still pending. If Crestline Park's trail behaves the way Homewood's did, the practical opening and the official one won't land on the same day.
The Trail Slots Into an Already-Full Calendar
None of this happens in a vacuum. Crestline Park already runs on its own rhythm of small, recurring gatherings, and the greenway is arriving into a neighborhood that has spent years building that rhythm around its 2.7-acre park off Kingsbury Avenue, known locally as the Hidden Park. Yoga in the Park is a standing fixture there. So is the neighborhood association's First Responders Christmas Meal, held at Hope Community Church on Montevallo Road. In May, the Crestline Park Community Foundation runs its annual Crestline Park Groove festival at the park itself, with Attic Plus Storage as title sponsor and lunch from Saw's Barbecue.
None of those events depend on the greenway. But a finished, paved trail running the length of the neighborhood gives all of them an easier front door. A Saturday that already includes yoga in the park or a walk past the Hidden Park's playground now has a paved route attached to it that didn't exist a year ago, one that eventually puts Mountain Brook's Irondale Furnace Trail within a continuous walk rather than a separate drive.
The ribbon-cutting will happen when the city decides the weather is right for it. The trail itself, by the neighborhood association's own account, already is.
If you're weighing what a finished greenway segment does for property values along Shades Creek, or you're simply curious what your own street looks like on the county's larger trail map, Hannah Sells Birmingham knows this stretch of Crestline Park well enough to walk you through it, one block at a time.
