This is an opinion column.
If you follow news at all in Alabama, you must certainly be aware of three things:One: Huntsville is so hot right now it probably causes sea level rise. It’s the best place to be born, the best place to be educated, the best place to live, to attend outdoor concerts or visit a museum honoring monkeys sent by redeemed Nazis to die in outer space. It is the best place to work, run, retire, raise a beer and obsess about rankings. When Huntsville is not ranked No. 1, such a mistake is by now universally condemned as stupid, prompting headlines such as:
Or
Why was Huntsville excluded from ‘best run’ cities ranking?
Two: Birmingham is the best place to die in America. In fact, we now know that everyone currently living in Birmingham will eventually die, and scientists are trying to determine if it is even possible for people to die outside its city limits. Studies by such esteemed groups as Walletheist.com and U.S. Nudes and Word Retorts – using top secret proprietary algorithms – say more people died in Birmingham in the past year than in the Vietnam War, the Spanish Inquisition and the Plague. One prestidigeous (yeah, I know) publication already unveiled rankings of the most dangerous cities for 2026, and foresaw Birmingham near the top. Helpful websites offering to sell weapons and Armageddon supplies point out:
10 Dangerous Cities Where You Shouldn’t Buy a Home No Matter the Price
Three: A legendary country music star that no one has ever heard of is arrested, convicted, or dies tragically every single day. The public clamors for this news, and consumes it in such quantity that it drains interest in important issues, like city council meetings or what Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Insta’d last night. I presume legendary country music stars are simply living their legendary art, what with the iconic dangers they face from mamas, trucks, trains, prison and getting drunk and throwing stuff over balconies. I will leave No. 3 with that.
The issues of Huntsville and Birmingham, however, are another kettle of kvetch. People have been heard arguing on planes about whether Huntsville, a town without a skyline*, could really be larger than Birmingham, a town with the world’s biggest cast iron statue of a naked blacksmith.
(*I have been warned by management that it would be unwise to make anymore Huntsville skyline jokes, as downtown Birmingham’s skyline is now crowned by a bowling-alley-sized banner advertisement hawking a university in Huntsville.)
(**Management lives in Huntsville.)
People argue that Huntsville’s city population means nothing because Birmingham’s metro is still twice as large. Huntsvillains argue that Birmingham is mean. Birminghamsters retort that Huntsville is a dweeby little booger face.
We could rely on a deep analysis of nerdy data from the U.S. Census Bureau to settle all those beefs. But that’s boring. So instead we count on highly professional viral statis-gicians who rank cities “Best” or “Worst” or “Most Sinful” (Birmingham is 20th, Huntsville 117th) based on rigorous analysis of important metrics like “sports-fan-friendliness,” “skate parks per capita” and “Google search traffic for the term ‘Tinder.’”
Some, I’m told, become so rankled by these rankings that they say even meaner things to one another.
I, on the other hand, am no rank amateur. I’ve lived in both Birmingham and Huntsville. Sure, I moved to Birmingham when there were 100,000 more of us, and I moved from Huntsville when it had 100,000 fewer people than it does now. But I’ve eaten in both towns, almost died in both towns, had kids baptised in both towns and taken them to emergency rooms in both. Surely I have more perspective than sexystatsRus.com.
So it was determined, after extensive exploration in a brief call with my editor, that I must study this issue further. I set off – braving dangerous Birmingham streets – to join the ever-increasing flow of traffic to the (7th) best city in America: Huntsville.
This is what happened.
The journey begins
It is a Monday morning and I just left the medical offices at UAB’s Kirklin Clinic, where I’m pretty sure my life was saved earlier in the year, with no waiting and no delay. On one visit, when my name had not been called 10 minutes after my appointed time, my doctor, a pulmonary specialist from Japan, came to the waiting room, sat down beside me, took notes about my health and apologized for the delay. Someone had a medical emergency in one of the patient rooms, but it shouldn’t take long. “No worries,” I said, and went back to talking to fellow patients who drove in from Gadsden and Decatur and somewhere in south Alabama, swearing the place had saved their lives, too.
On the day of this journey, though, I was in and out, seen satisfactorily, in 30 minutes. Huntsville has outer space covered, I thought. Birmingham has the inner space.
8:15 a.m.
The downside of being a mecca for medical patients is that each morning the parking decks around UAB fill up with far-flung ranchers and farmers and state legislators and school principals with some medical problem worth venturing into the DMZ to solve. All of them drive Ford pickup trucks the size of a downtown loft apartment, which gives them the high ground but sacrifices mobility. They inch along in search of a parking space to squeeze their front two-thirds into. I spent more time trying to leave the deck than I’d spent in the lobby.
8:30 a.m.
I admit that, as a jaded Birmingham resident, I do not feel unsafe in my town, despite what the rankers might tell me. What makes me have violent thoughts are its traffic lights, which are apparently operated by hamsters as part of a 10-year experiment by the UAB psychology department. The only reason Birmingham does not rank last in traffic light synchronization and efficiency is that such rankings don’t seem to exist, presumably because the ranker from shallowunderstandingofstats.com came to Birmingham, got stuck interminably at a light, succumbed to road rage, gave a local a two-finger salute and was shot dead, which is of course justifiable in any Southern town.
After dutifully stopping at five red lights in five blocks I made my way onto the interstate. I encountered no gunfire, and considered issuing a news alert. But I had another job to do. I headed to Huntsville, only slightly concerned that if I looked too closely into its heart I would be mesmerized, as if by some mythical beast, and would be unwilling to leave.
But still I drove, past 3,786 billboards for Alexander Shunnarah and almost as many for guns, ammo or Jesus. I arrived on time.
10:05 a.m.
Though I like to think I have plenty of Huntsville experience, I’d commissioned a sort of Huntsville Sherpa to show me the areas of growth and glitter and to uncover any unlikely signs of grit. Meaning I asked a guy – Stephens – to shuttle me around.
Stephens was late. Perhaps he was merely embodying that Huntsville spirit of being “busy working,” or “in a meeting.” Two things, by the way, that require a physics degree to pull off at the same time. Very Huntsville.
So I went alone to the art museum, which is beautiful but closed on Mondays (like Birmingham’s). I wandered Big Spring Park, a place I remembered as a kid, a park where I once met a secret source who told me things about the state board of education you might have later read when we had these things called newspapers. It was a place once as overrun with rattlesnakes as I-565 is now overrun with commuters.
And they said Birmingham had a dangerous past.
But today Big Spring Park was bustling with bipeds. Churches, defense contractors, tattoo parlors and a duo named “Eric and Derrell on YouTube” decorated hundreds of Christmas trees for the annual Tinsel Trail, which runs till the end of the year, when the ball drops in Times Square and Birmingham records its final, record-breaking homicide.
I asked a woman decorating a tree what it was all about. She was a typical Huntvillian, having moved South from Michigan, and said Huntsville in general, and the Tinsel Trail in particular (Didja know?) is the best thing ever. As a professional reporter, I figured I better check it out.
People across the park were busy with another event entirely. That affair featured long tables set with plates and silverware. What beckoned me, though, was its neat bank of Porta-Potties. You may not realize the best way to judge any town or event is by its portable toilets. A rank restroom is ruin in the rankings. Plus I had to go.
A self-styled ranker on Reddit claimed a recent Phish festival was No. 1 for No. 2, but I have to admit Big Spring Park was Johnny on the spot, with pristine privies. But it was yet Monday morning, so I washed my hands of it and went to see what that festival was about. A rattlesnake rodeo perhaps? A Military Industrial fun fair?
I found a group serving a “free citywide Thanksgiving meal” as a way “to unite people from all walks of life.” It was frankly touching, and I have no damn jokes to make.
So far, the best argument against Huntsville being the best city in which to live was the same reason I swore off Hallmark movies. They’re shiny and make you feel good until you realize they aren’t real. Besides, Stephens finally finished his call or his venti iced half-caf caramel macchiato with soy milk (or black coffee, as he called it), and told me he’d pick me up outside a coffee shop he could not recommend.
10:45 a.m.
Where would we go from there? If I were showing Birmingham I’d take visitors to Sloss Furnace and tell of the ghosts, or to Vulcan to admire that big iron butt. I’d take them to Kelly Ingram Park and old Rickwood Field and maybe that spot beneath the Cahaba River Bridge where Klansmen planned bombings as a way to keep the races apart. Because it is important to remember history’s villains, and what they can do to a town, or a nation.
Huntsville in the last few years has been named among the top cities for sweet confections, happiness, music venues, tech talent, quality of life and retirement. It is sure to get a nod for Best Performance by a Porta-Potty While Building Unity Through Food and Decorating Christmas Trees in a Park Once Filled With Rattlesnakes.
I was surprised to see that it ranked as the top ski resort, too. But that turned out to be Huntsville, Utah. A fine place, no doubt, but a second-rate Huntsville.
Stephens asked if I’d like to see museums or gardens or hippies up the mountain or space stuff, but I’ve seen all that.
I told him to stop at a cool local grocery store. He told me they sold a great local hot sauce there, but they didn’t.
“Maybe the guy died,” Stephens said.
I bought some dog treats in order to ask the cashier a few questions. I told her I’d come to find the truth.
“I keep reading that Huntsville is the greatest place ever,” I said. To which she replied:
“What?”
“You know, it’s on all these lists of best places to live and stuff,” I said. To which she again replied:
“What?” But then, she was not a typical Huntsvillian. It sounded like she’d been there all her life.
I rephrased my question, and asked her and her bagger what I should see while in their town. They agreed I should go to a nearby cemetery, where I could admire some Civil War graves. I asked the name of the cemetery, but neither remembered.
“Go up to the light and take a left,” the bagger said. And I forgot the rest.
But Stephens knew it, and took me there, to Maple Hill Cemetery, as it turned out. It was a good cemetery, a pleasant place for a body to rot, I suppose, with a separate section for Civil War graves and a Confederate monument that had been moved from downtown in the dead of night. Which actually seemed a pretty good solution.
Stephens had insisted he’d be at least mostly objective as a tour guide, claiming no real skin in the Huntsville game. He was a typical Huntsvillian, so he had arrived years ago from some metropolis on some coast where the NFL just means more. He would not be a homer or a snoot, he assured me before recommending that I listen to a Russian composer named Sergei Prokofiev. I admitted I was not familiar with his work.
“No, I guess not,” he said. “Guess they don’t have him down in the ‘Ham.”
He did take me to a vaunted confectionery with a French name, which was closed on Mondays. He showed me new neighborhoods and apartment construction that looked like new neighborhoods and apartment construction in Birmingham and every city I’ve visited in the last decade – of a style that will age like milk. Or Nickelback.
We passed restaurant after restaurant – Edgar’s Bakery, Melt, Brick & Tin – that somehow wound up in Huntsville by expanding out of Birmingham. Hmm, I thought. And we both thought of lunch.
12:20 p.m..
Normally, when in North Alabama, I choose barbecue, because rankings be damned, North Alabama barbecue is objectively the best barbecue in Alabama, if not the world. But Stephens is a pescatarian, and that narrows things down. I told him I was raised a Methodist but he just looked at me as if I were talking gibberish. But then, I told you he’s not really from around here.
We passed Olive Gardens and Carrabbas and Longhorns and Dave & Busters and a hundred places you can find on any traffic-filled throughway in any American city or its suburbs – or in any reader poll of the best restaurants in Anytown. “McMansions and chain restaurants,” as my colleague Matt Wake refers to such places.
We passed local spots like The Poppy and Parliament and Domaine South, quirky places that seem to be uniquely Huntsville. We chose Vietnamese, since I haven’t had a good Banh Mi since Phở Quê Hương closed back home. This one was good enough to go on some kind of list.
2:20 p.m.
We met a guy who moved to Huntsville from California, and found it a great, affordable, list-topping sort of place to live. I met a guy who moved to Huntsville from Boston. When I asked what he liked most about Huntsville, he took a grapefruit spoon and ripped out my heart.
“It’s the biggest city in Alabama,” he said, and paused as if that was it. Then he continued. “And it still has that small-town feel.”
The truth is, he was right, as I’d been saying to Stephens moments before. It’s sort of Huntsville’s thing, which makes my skyline jokes even less funny. There was more to see, of course. Rush hour traffic and Trash Pandas and a library I love that locals call Fort Book.
6 p.m.
On my way home, on the bridge over the Tennessee River I played on as a child, I tried to rank these two cities I have called home.
Birmingham is No. 1 for fine dining and healthcare and some other stuff – including a million people in its suburbs. Huntsville has its federally funded economy, a real sense of community and city limits big enough to keep it all together.
And that’s when it was revealed to me, as if by Eggbeater Jesus himself, how stupid these rankings really are. At the end of the day both of these places – and a bunch more in Alabama and across the country – are 70 percent lookalike American sprawl and 30 percent local personality that is simply trying to hang on.
It’s really about finding people you want to be around. Why on earth would anybody trust buystufffromus.com to tell them where they should live?
That’s like asking Google to tell you what’s better, a PB&J or a BLT. I tried that, and this is what it told me, with that artificial stuff it calls intelligence.
“Depending on what you prioritize in a sandwich, a PB&J might be considered ‘better’ than a BLT if you’re looking for a more balanced nutritional profile with protein and fiber from the peanut butter, while a BLT might be preferred if you enjoy the savory taste and texture of bacon, lettuce, and tomato, even if it’s higher in saturated fat.”
Hey, sometimes you gotta live dangerously.
