Paramount's Publix Theatres chain announced plans for the Alabama in 1926, breaking ground on April 1, 1927. The concrete-and-steel building cost approximately $1.5 million - serious money in an era when a movie ticket cost a quarter. The Alabama opened on schedule that December, the largest theater in Birmingham's bustling theater district, a stretch of downtown that once hummed with vaudeville houses, nickelodeons, and movie palaces showing Hollywood's latest. The interior dripped with ornament: gold leaf, elaborate plasterwork, grand lobbies, and a Hall of Mirrors that made the building feel less like a cinema and more like a European opera house transplanted to the Deep South. Birmingham had arrived, and the Alabama Theatre was its proof.

In 1934, disaster struck next door. The Loveman's of Alabama department store, adjacent to the theater, was destroyed by fire. A thick firewall saved the Alabama, though smoke seeped through air vents and stained the auditorium walls. Those smoke marks would remain for 64 years - quiet witnesses to the blaze - until a complete restoration in 1998 finally erased them. That restoration cleaned and replaced gold leaf, recovered seats, and hung new carpeting and drapes. The timing was poetic: as the Alabama was reborn, the old Loveman's building next door was being converted into the McWane Science Center. The neighborhood was reinventing itself, and the theater led the way.

When the Alabama was built, movies were silent. Orchestras or theater pipe organs provided the music, the drama, the emotional cues that sound editing would later handle. The Alabama's organ is a four-manual Crawford Special-Publix One Mighty Wurlitzer - a name that sounds like it belongs on a circus poster, but the instrument is serious. Originally installed with 20 ranks of pipes, it has been expanded over the decades to 32 ranks, plus percussion instruments and sound effects designed to accompany everything from comedies to chase scenes. Of the 17 Crawford Special models Wurlitzer produced, Big Bertha is among only three that remain in their original theaters. She still rises from the orchestra pit on her hydraulic lift before performances, a tradition that draws applause from audiences who have seen it a hundred times.

Birmingham's theater district once brimmed with grand venues. One by one, they fell to demolition, neglect, or conversion. Today, only two remain: the Alabama and the Lyric Theatre, a 1914 vaudeville house directly across the street. Birmingham Landmarks, the nonprofit that owns the Alabama, also rescued the Lyric, reopening it in 2016 after an $11.5 million restoration. Together, the two theaters anchor a district that hosts approximately 250 events each year, drawing more than 400,000 people to Broadway-style shows, ballet, opera, concerts, classic film screenings, and the beloved holiday tradition of sing-along movies. The Alabama is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage - official recognition of what Birmingham residents already knew: this building is irreplaceable.