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Photo by Erica Techo.
Darren and Elizabeth Pruitt moved to Hoover with their two kids, 5-year-old Zachary and 3-year-old Penny.
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Photo courtesy of the Hoover Historical Society.
William’s Store was one of Hoover’s earliest businesses.
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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Bill Box’s father, Joe Box, opened Green Valley Drug in 1961.
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Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Donald Byron, owner of Bluff Park Hardware.
In the summer of 1969, Alabama Department of Public Safety agents drove north on Interstate 65 to a dark and secluded lane leading off Old Montgomery Highway to a building near the Cahaba River.
Their destination was known as the Kid McCoy Place. It was a popular spot where visitors from Birmingham and other areas came to eat, drink and, to the Department of Public Safety’s dismay, gamble.
On this particular Saturday night, the agents intended to shut down the speakeasy, but the raid failed. The agents arrived to find the Kid McCoy Place closed and as dark as the road leading to it. Someone, they suspected, had tipped off the operators.
Today, the site of the Kid McCoy Place is in the city of Hoover. But on that night in 1969, municipal limits of the 2-year-old town lay several miles to the north. Hoover was, at that time, nothing more than a small cluster of homes and a few early businesses.
To the north were the bright lights of Vestavia Hills, Homewood and Birmingham. But to the east, west and south to Pelham lay dark roads and forest — the kind of place patrons of the Kid McCoy Place appreciated.
Its days in the secluded darkness were numbered, however, just as were Hoover’s days as an inconsequential dot of light in that darkness.
In only a half century — an exceedingly brief period for the life of a city — Hoover grew to become Alabama’s sixth-largest municipality and a center of economic growth and strength — a place that today generates roughly $4 billion in retail sales a year, according to Mayor Frank Brocato.
The beginnings were inauspicious. However, the vision of a city on this undeveloped edge of south Jefferson and north Shelby counties burned bright in the mind of William Hoover Sr., who moved his insurance company, Employers Mutual of Alabama, to a site facing the recently four-laned U.S. 31 in 1958.
He donated land for a school and sold lots at a discount to encourage community growth. He had long dreamed of launching a new city, and he did not intend to be denied.
A motel came, a drugstore, then a few other stores to serve the growing number of families.
For early business owners, locating on the south side of Shades Mountain was as much a gamble as the Kid McCoy Place, which today is nothing more than a novel memory that was not wanted and not able to survive in the brightening lights of city expansion.
The bets by those early Hoover businesses paid off in bigger ways than anyone, except perhaps Hoover himself, could have imagined.
The graph of Hoover’s commercial growth is one of sharp upward spikes separated by periods of steady upswings. Few, if any, dips show up on the timeline of commercial growth.
Hoover incorporated in 1967 on a few square blocks of land immediately east of U.S. 31, and early growth followed along that stretch of highway from the northern Lorna Road intersection southward to the Patton Chapel Road intersection.
A number of automobile dealers found that grouping their businesses along the highway to be advantageous, earning the nickname “Motor Mile” for one segment. In less than a decade, Hoover’s section of U.S. 31 was crowded with businesses and even more crowded with vehicle traffic. Some described the highway as a parking lot.
I-65 ended at the U.S. 31 intersection, dumping a heavy load of tractor-trailer trucks and out-of-area travelers into the mix of local traffic.
Still, more and more businesses sought land to become a part of the growing city.
In the two decades following Hoover’s incorporation, two events accelerated commercial growth and changed the face of Hoover’s business community.
First, in 1980, Hoover annexed the sprawling Riverchase planned development that included a large commerce park on the east side of U.S. 31. That annexation forever changed Hoover from a bedroom community to a freestanding city with a mix of residential and commercial areas.
Second, in 1984, the completion of the I-65/I-459 interchange relieved traffic pressure from U.S. 31 and opened traffic corridors from all directions. The event was “probably the biggest economic event in city history,” Hoover planning consultant Bob House said.
The intersection of two interstate highways, plus a major federal highway (U.S. 31), was a commerce magnet.
Two years after the interchange completion, the Riverchase Galleria opened immediately west of the interchange, and businesses flocked to its shopping sphere.
Hoover was instantly a regional shopping destination and growing larger by the day as businesses spread outward from the 3.3 million-square-foot center. U.S. 31, Lorna Road and Alabama 150 all saw rapid retail growth.
Alabama 150 began as a two-lane route to Bessemer, but construction of the Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, development of Trace Crossings around the stadium and commercial development along the route pushed its widening to five lanes and quickened growth west of the Galleria.
In 1990, only four years after the Galleria’s opening, Hoover began annexing residential and commercial property along U.S. 280, another major federal highway to the east of I-65 and intersected by I-459. It was an area growing at least as rapidly as Hoover, and the expanding business community along U.S. 280 provided Hoover another center of commerce.
As Hoover Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Bill Powell observed: “Give me two interstates and two major U.S. highways” and a city will almost certainly sprout from those transportation arteries.
“One thing about it, [Hoover’s government leadership] sure didn’t mess it up,” Powell said.
Indeed, Hoover’s government leaders proved visionary and let it be known that “Hoover is open for business,” House said. They sought to encourage commercial growth and to sustain it.
House said an important reason for the sustained growth is that city leaders didn’t “allow just anything to come in here.”
In the city’s earliest days, U.S. 31 had an eclectic and cluttered appearance with a wide variety of signs and building styles. The annexation of Riverchase and its planned development style revealed a new way of looking at growth and development, which city leaders used as a guide for the city’s future. City leaders, House said, demanded a certain “quality of development” related to landscaping, parking, tree conservation and other safety and amenity standards.
That demand, he added, continues to pay dividends.
Today, Hoover boasts more than a dozen commercial centers, including Chace Corporate Center along Data Drive, the Southlake area along Valleydale Road, Inverness on U.S. 280 and along Stadium Trace Parkway. Retail centers include Patton Creek, the Alabama 150 corridor, The Village at Lee Branch on U.S. 280, Inverness Corners and Plaza, Lorna Road, Bluff Park, Southlake and The Grove.
Some choice retail land remains to be developed, but much already is developed. Looking forward, one next step is to develop a strategic city plan.
Additionally, according to Mayor Brocato, the city is looking to diversify its economy by recruiting science, technology, engineering and mathematics businesses.
As it is, the last published city financial report listed 9,849 individual business licenses issued, representing the smallest mom-and-pop stores to the city’s largest commercial concern. That number has increased every year since the Great Recession of 2008-09.
Information for this article by the Hoover Historical Society came from the society’s book, “A History of Hoover, Alabama and Its People,” by Marilyn Davis Barefield; “The History of the Hoover Fire Department 1962-2012,” by Frank Brocato, now Hoover’s mayor; the City of Hoover 2015 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report; and from interviews with Hoover Planning Consultant Bob House, Hoover Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Bill Powell and City of Hoover Public Information Officer Lori Salter-Schommer.
