Sunday Focus: About Anniversaries

     This is not the first time I've groused about this subject. I posted about it in a piece about the movie 42. It is up for debate again now because Birmingham was celebrating the 100th Anniversary of The Tutweiler Hotel on Saturday. 
     All well and good, except for the fact that the hotel is not 100 years old. The building it is in now was built in 1914, but it was an apartment building then.
   
Here's the online headline of the story in The Birmingham News:

Ceremony, historic landmark sign notes 100th anniversary of downtown Birmingham hotel

  Apparently wanting desperately to make the connection more real, the story adds:  Both buildings used the same architects. 

      I really hate to burst all of those celebratory bubbles and blow out the candles on the special cake, but here is the truth, from the Bhamwiki entry:

     The (Tutweiler)  hotel closed for good just five years later, on April 1, 1972.
...the property was purchased by the Exchange Security Bank, which was set to construct a new First Alabama Bank building there. The hotel was scheduled to be brought down by explosive charges on the morning of January 26, 1974, a Sunday. The charges, placed by the T. M. Burgin Demolition Co., succeeded in dropping the 20th Street facade, but left a large section of the south wing standing. A second series of blasts twisted that section in on itself. The company decided to complete the remainder of the demolition by conventional means.

In 1985 it was decided to convert the Ridgely Apartments building, which had also been built by Robert Jemison Jr. in 1913 and was owned by the Tutwiler family, into a new luxury hotel named after the original. In 1986 renovations of the building were completed and the new Tutwiler opened to guests. 

     So there is a fourteen year gap in the great centennial anniversary. There was no Tutweiler Hotel between 1972 and 1986. Therefore the 100th Anniversary will be in 2028, and even then it is the celebration of the  name only, since like some other historic Birmingham buildings, they tore down the original.

  [Sunday Focus is a regular feature of Tim Lennox.com]