11 Businesses Alabamians Still Miss From Their Old Downtown

Birmingham’s Standard Furniture closed its downtown showroom this spring, after 114 years in the same trade.

The neon sign had been up since 1978.

Alabama’s main streets have been losing that kind of business for fifty years, and most of them left without a marker.

These are the businesses Alabamians still miss from their old downtown.

1. Five-and-Dime Stores

Birmingham’s S.H. Kress Five-and-Ten Cent Store went up in 1937 on 19th Street North.

It thrived through World War II.

Then shoppers followed the suburbs.

The store closed in 1978.

That’s forty-one years, gone.

Matching Kress buildings once anchored Main Streets in Selma, Huntsville, and Mobile too.

A whole downtown grew up around that one wide, creaky-floored store.

A single historical marker on 19th Street is now the only thing that tells anyone a Kress store ever stood there.

2. Soda Fountain Counters

A soda fountain counter used to sit inside almost every Alabama drugstore, pouring cherry Cokes for whoever pulled up a stool.

Payne’s in Scottsboro has kept its marble counter running since 1891, and every Thursday it still sells a nickel scoop of ice cream to anyone 65 or older.

Auburn’s Toomer’s Drugs kept its fountain too.

Both are the exception now, not the rule.

A town without either one has no downtown counter left where a kid can spin on a stool and order a cherry Coke.

3. Hometown Hardware Stores

Huntsville’s Lewter Hardware sold nails, paint, and advice on Washington Street for four generations of the same family.

The store closed in October 2022, after 94 years at the same address.

Gone in a season.

Grandparents, parents, and kids all bought their bolts and hinges from the same counter.

When the doors finally shut, the Lewter family donated the store’s old ledgers to the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

A big-box aisle can sell a hammer, but it can’t tell a customer which one their grandfather bought.

4. Downtown Department Stores

Downtown department stores gave Birmingham its social calendar, not just its shopping list.

Loveman’s rebuilt itself after a 1934 fire and reopened with air conditioning and Alabama’s first escalator, a marvel that pulled in shoppers from across the state.

The store closed in 1980 after its parent company went bankrupt.

Pizitz, its rival two blocks over, followed by the end of the decade.

Parisian eventually sold off its name entirely.

Three flagships became three vacant buildings within a decade of each other.

A shopper today can’t find a department store’s fitting room, layaway counter, or Santa photo line anywhere in downtown Birmingham.

5. Small-Town Movie Palaces

Bessemer’s Lincoln Theatre opened in 1948 as a 400-seat movie house built for Black moviegoers barred from other downtown screens during segregation.

The theater closed by the early 1980s, after a little more than three decades of first-run movies.

A short run as a furniture store was the only thing to occupy the building afterward.

Actor and Bessemer native Andre Holland bought the Lincoln Theatre in 2017 and started a nonprofit restoration in 2024.

The Alabama Historical Commission still added the theater to its 2025 Places in Peril list.

No film has played there since the theater closed.

The marquee has now stood dark longer than it ever lit up.

6. Furniture and Appliance Stores

Standard Furniture got its start as the Standard Furnishing Company in 1912, selling goods out of a peddler’s wagon before the Shevinsky family ever had a Birmingham storefront.

The store moved into the Ideal Building on 19th Street North in 1941 and later relocated to 3rd Avenue North in 1978.

Standard Furniture closed that downtown Birmingham showroom this spring after 114 years in business.

The company didn’t keep a downtown location in its plans going forward.

Standard Furniture isn’t gone.

Its website lists a dozen other Alabama stores in cities like Cullman, Hartselle, and Talladega.

None of them sit on the downtown Birmingham block shoppers used for generations.

7. Family Jewelry Stores

Bromberg’s kept a downtown Birmingham storefront on 20th Street from 1900 onward, fitting engagement rings and christening gifts for generations of the same families.

The company, which says it is among the oldest family-owned retail businesses in the country, closed that retail store in 2009 and turned the building into offices instead.

Bromberg’s still keeps working jewelry displays in the windows of that old storefront.

Anyone walking past on 20th Street can see the rings and watches, even though the door leads to an office now, not a sale.

8. Locally Owned Clothing Shops

Whitten’s Town & Country Clothes fitted Sand Mountain families for suits, church dresses, and school clothes from 1948 until it closed for good.

The Albertville shop rang up its final sale on September 21, 2017, after three generations of the same family stood behind the register.

That’s three generations who worked that register, then none did.

A clerk who knew a customer’s collar size by memory is a service no app replaces.

Marshall County has gone nine years now without another shop offering that same fitting-room memory.

9. Homegrown Bakeries

Savage’s Bakery filled Birmingham-area cake orders for 87 years, long enough that grandmothers and granddaughters both grew up on its birthday cakes.

The Homewood bakery closed in early February 2026, after 87 years on 18th Street South.

Kenneth Rhodes, who owns O’Carr’s Delicatessen across the street, bought Savage’s and reopened it that March, stocking the same recipes regulars grew up on.

Savage’s Bakery is open again, but the Savage family isn’t the one running it anymore.

Regulars can order the same cakes, but the ovens now answer to a different name on the deed.

10. Feed and Seed Stores

C.T. Garvin Feed and Seed sold chicken feed, garden seed, and pet supplies to Huntsville families since founder Cressie Thornton Garvin Sr. opened it in 1934.

Farmers and backyard gardeners both counted on it.

The Holmes Avenue store closed just over 90 years after it opened.

Huntsville shoppers who want what Garvin sold now have to drive out to the company’s Elkmont store instead.

Nothing replaced the Holmes Avenue counter in town.

11. Downtown Barbershops

Opelika’s Downtown Barbershop held the same building for more than 75 years, and owner Phil Gorham came from a family of barbers going back to the 1800s.

Gorham bought the shop in 1985 and kept the doors open for 35 years himself.

The shop closed in December 2020.

That’s more than 75 years of barbershop business in that same building, done.

No haircut chain replicates a barber who’s cut three generations of the same family’s hair in the same chair.

One General Store That Escaped the Wrecking Ball

Many of Alabama’s downtown general stores didn’t get a happy ending, but the Old Grant Store near Ward did.

T.L.S. Grant built the wood-frame store in 1924.

It stocked feed, fabric, and remedies, plus a post office up front and a doctor’s office in back, all under one tin roof.

The store closed decades ago, but new owners Danny and Betty Curtis filled it with antiques instead of letting it fall in.

Anyone can still walk through it today by calling ahead and setting up a visit with the Curtises.

It survives as a museum piece more than a shop, which is exactly the chance many Alabama Main Street stores never got.

What Emptied Alabama’s Main Streets

Alabama’s Main Streets emptied out for a reason, and that reason had an address.

Birmingham’s Eastwood Mall opened four miles east of downtown in 1960, with 43 stores under one roof and free parking out front.

Downtown businesses couldn’t match either one.

More malls followed through the 1970s.

Department stores, five-and-dimes, and specialty shops packed up and moved to the parking lots right along with the shoppers.

Alabama's Downtown Comeback

Alabama has spent the years since trying to undo some of that damage.

Main Street Alabama, the state's downtown revitalization program, says its member communities have drawn more than $1 billion in new investment into 36 historic districts since 2014.

New bakery, boutique, and coffee-shop owners are filling old storefronts with that money instead of letting them sit empty.

It's slow, steady progress.

A five-and-dime isn't coming back to any of those buildings.

Something is finally paying the light bill again.