Historic but not pretentious – that might be how you could describe Sheffield, one of the four municipalities that make up Northwest Alabama’s Quad Cities.
It’s a Wednesday in mid-April. I had scheduled a sit-down interview with Sheffield’s Mayor Ian Sanford to talk about the resurgence of his city’s downtown. What I ended up getting was a personally-guided walking tour from the mayor.
As we walk along Montgomery Avenue, the downtown’s main drag, Sanford points to an apartment building where Jason Isbell, the Grammy-winning solo artist formerly of the Drive-By Truckers, once resided. He notes this because over the past few decades, it was not uncommon for musicians in the early stages of their careers to make Sheffield a home.
Later on in our tour, we visit the site of the old Sheffield Community Center, a venue where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis performed. There is a background to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lyrics, we all know “Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers, and they’ve been known to pick a song or two;” and that history has been the foundation for this revitalization.
This region of the state referred to as “the Shoals,” is believed to be named for a once-shallow spot on the Tennessee River and includes the cities of Sheffield, Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia and Florence.
The Beginnings
Sheffield sits on a high bluff on the southern shore of the Tennessee River. Its namesake comes from the city’s founders Alfred Moses and Walter Gordon, who wanted to build an industrial city reminiscent of Sheffield, England. The two men purchased 2,700 acres and founded the Sheffield Land, Iron and Coal Company in 1883.
Their city was incorporated two years later. Moses served as the first mayor. In those early days, Sheffield was home to five blast furnaces that operated until 1926.
Since then, the city has been a railroad hub, the nearby home to two of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s nitrate plants, a plant for aluminum-producing Reynolds Metals, and perhaps most famously the Muscle Shoals Sound studio and many of its offshoots.
From boom to ‘doormat’ of the Quad Cities
The city of Sheffield had its best years following World War II. In his book, “92 Years in Colbert County, Alabama: Before & After Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks,” O. W. “Woody” Stanley described Sheffield in 2007 as a “struggling” place.
“Sheffield is and has been struggling with no great promises in sight,” Stanley wrote. “In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, Sheffield was a very progressive town on the move, Not so now. Sheffield has been on the decline for several years. Here’s hoping that something will happen to bring Sheffield back.”
Mayor Ian Sanford has lived through Sheffield’s ups and downs.
“Sheffield used to be a booming city,” Sanford told Yellowhammer News. “When I was growing up here in the 1950s and 60s – after World War II, it was going. You couldn’t find a parking place downtown.”
“Everybody remembers riding their bicycle downtown,” he added. “If you had a dollar, you could pretty much do anything. You could go to a movie, go get a hamburger – whatever.”
According to the mayor, several factors led to the “slow demise” of Sheffield, which he added, did not happen overnight, and therefore it should not be expected that it could be brought back overnight.
The economic data bears out that Sheffield has had its struggles over the past several decades. With a median income of $33,869 annual, it lags behind the other three other Quad Cities of Florence ($37,058), Tuscumbia ($47,500) and Muscle Shoals ($52,132).
The blight left over from the down period gave Sheffield a bad reputation.
“We were kind of the doormat of the Shoals,” Sanford said when asked about his city’s standing in the region. “But we never believed it.”
Weathering the storm
Despite that bad rap associated with Sheffield, Carl Cassidy, a florist and proprietor of Lola’s Gifts & Flowers, stuck it out in downtown Sheffield through the lean years.
He explained to Yellowhammer News how he came to Sheffield when there was nothing and started his business with the help of his family. Since then he has grown into one of the state’s biggest florists.
“It started out doing just $50,000 a year,” Cassidy said. “Now we do some parties that are $50,000.”
“It’s just been family-oriented, and I’ll say I just weathered the storm,” he added. “My product didn’t matter if I was in a warehouse somewhere or if I was on the main street. Yes, I probably would have had more walk-in [business], but I entered the industry at a time when things were changing, from FTD to people doing extravagant weddings and parties. I’m in little downtown Sheffield, and we have clients from Iuka. We have clients from Huntsville. We have clients from Decatur.”
At one time, Cassidy said his clients would come to visit him and ask why he was located in the middle of a blighted industrial Sheffield, but that has changed.
“Now they come, and they go, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’” he said.
Cassidy said that now he describes his current location to customers as the “Midtown of the Shoals.”
He explained that once a “very good” and “wealthy” client urged him to move his business to nearby Florence, which he pronounced as “Flaah-ar-ence” to indicate the client’s “old Shoals area” demeanor when making those overtures. But Cassidy resisted and remained in Sheffield.
“It’s just home,” he said of Sheffield and noted that many of his wealthy clients who reside outside of Sheffield around the area initially made their fortunes in Sheffield.
The comeback started with Outback
Sanford, who was first elected in 1996, said he knew they had to do something different. The first step of this new course he said was convincing Outback Steakhouse to build within Sheffield’s city limits.
“In 1999, and this was a big deal for us, was to get Outback here,” he said. “We formed a commercial development authority, and we had to borrow money to buy the land. We did the site prep. We did everything.”
Sanford explained that the Outback recruitment was a bit of a windfall and group effort. A resident who was doing plumbing on Outback’s buildings brought an executive from Outback, and one thing led to another, resulting in a Sheffield Outback located just on the eastern edge of Sheffield.
“We had to borrow the money, and our debt that we had to pay back every month was around $50,000,” Sanford said. “But the income coming in was $100,000. I will do that every day. That was almost 20 years ago, and they haven’t missed a beat.”
He likened that effort and others, including bringing in another retailer called Discount Dan’s, to spokes extending from the hub of a wheel, with the hub being the downtown.
“You can get by with one broken spoke, maybe two, but [downtown is] the hub,” he said. “When I got here – the stationary had smokestacks on it because it used to be a smokestack thing back when it was founded. Hell, we didn’t have a smokestack anywhere. I thought, why is that our logo? I thought, well then what are we? We are the center of the Shoals.”
Renovations underway
It’s springtime in northeastern Alabama when nature comes out of hibernation and back to life. The trees are growing new leaves. Flowers are beginning to bloom. In keeping with that theme, along Montgomery Avenue, many of the downtown’s older buildings are under renovation. The city’s currently fast-paced and obvious facelift is what piqued my initial interest in Sheffield.
When walking around, it is immediately apparent that there is a transition underway. Behind the various storefronts, there is a mix of the newly refurbished, the old and the dilapidated, and underway renovations everywhere.
Sanford introduces me to developer Laquita Logan, who has been at the vanguard of Sheffield’s renaissance. She is the proprietor of three of the city’s newer downtown businesses. In what were boarded-up buildings with rusting awnings and chipped and fading paint just three years ago, Logan renovated and made into The Rock Christian bookstore/coffee shop and Salon 310 spa and hair salon. Adjacent to that is a building that was the city’s first new construction in decades, which Logan has made into Zoey Belle’s, a men’s and women’s clothing store.
“I call it a hidden treasure because it’s got so much history, and it’s so cool,” Logan said in an interview with Yellowhammer News. “And I just like the community. I like the people.”
Logan explained how she and her husband were involved in the city’s annual springtime downtown street party and inquired as to why Sheffield’s downtown seemed to have a dearth of life. That led to a meeting between Logan and Sheffield’s longtime mayor, Ian Sanford and resulted in Logan purchasing the lot where Zoey Belle’s is located.
So far, her efforts have shown promise.
“Business is good,” she said. “It could be better, but you know when you’re a pioneer, and you’re the only one.”
Logan hopes the influx of people living in the 30 new loft apartments downtown will help business and remains committed to downtown Sheffield. In addition to the existing business, her family owns the building housing a new hardware store and is renovating another building that will be home to a restaurant.
Entrepreneurship in the spirit of the city’s music tradition
Willy Cardin, a 40-something resident of Nashville who spent the better part of the last two decades as an educator, is now one Sheffield’s most important entrepreneurs.
Cardin hopes to take a venue in the heart of Sheffield’s downtown that has struggled under previous ownerships and turn it into a multi-purpose venue that will be called Dorm Eleven. It is an idea he had in mind since the late 1990s as a student at the nearby University of North Alabama.
“I have been interested in Sheffield for years,” Cardin told Yellowhammer. “Actually, I’ve probably been looking around for about 15 years. I always found it romantic – just the old town, the main street, lots of beautiful old buildings. I’ve always had a dream of finding one to put a business in. Just so happens, the one I found has everything I was looking for.”
Cardin has undertaken much of the remodeling effort on his own, but his vision for the venue includes a stage for music performances, room for food trucks, a bar with beer and wine offered and perhaps at some later time lodging options for acts performing at his venue. In keeping with the Shoals tradition, it also will also include a studio for musicians to record and a place he can still teach music.
“The space is for all this – mixed-use,” he said. “Some of the rooms that were here were kind of a bonus, but I would have found one I wanted to put a recording studio in anyway. It already had that. You can build out a venue, but it already had a venue space that was already being used.”
During our visit, Cardin asked Sanford about overcoming some of the government hurdles that come with starting a business in 2018, to which Sanford seems to be somewhat in his element. Later on, I asked him about his role in helping new business navigate the bureaucracy.
“We didn’t have people knocking down our doors to come here,” he said. “When you get somebody, sell them. Sell them on the city. We tried to make it easy – not to cut corners. You know people – they like to feel welcome. Don’t act like they’re bothering you.”
A ‘classically funky’ but realistic vision
Sanford described the revitalization of his city’s downtown as a perfect storm given that there were people who wanted to buy the downtown buildings just as the people who owned the buildings were wanting to sell them.
“We never really lost hope, but we just weren’t sure when the luck was going to show up, and it showed up about three or four years ago,” he said. “I call it the big miracle.”
While things are certainly on the upturn, Sanford remains realistic with no grand plans of overtaking any of his Quad Cities rivals, especially Florence.
“It’s a small town,” Sanford said. “It will never be as big as Florence. Florence is the regional retail here, and it is lovely, no qualms. And over here you have Sheffield, Muscle Shoals and Tuscumbia.”
Sanford pointed out those three municipalities opposite of Florence are all adjacent, separated only by imaginary lines.
“Everything crosses those city limit lines, whether it be crime, odor, you name it – other than sales tax. Sales tax just goes to a screeching halt.”
The longtime mayor emphasized his desire to keep the history, but he also seeks to improve upon it – a grand vision which he labeled “classically funky.”
“We’re somewhat a bedroom community but coming back – the thing that I tell people when they ask what do you want Sheffield to be – I tell them I want it to be classically funky. I like some funk, but it has got to be nice funk.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and is the editor of Breitbart TV.
