Ideal Department Store Building, Birmingham Alabama

Date added: February 23, 2025

View of facade, terra cotta details; looking northwest (1985)

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The Ideal Department Store Building, with its ornamental terra cotta facade, typifies one of Birmingham's most popular early 20th-century commercial styles, which reached its fullest expression in the 1920s. It was characterized by the use of terra cotta, either gleaming white or richly colored, and the incorporation of such Renaissance Revival details as cartouches, bas-relief arabesques, and denticulated cornices. The lavishness of the ornament and materials exemplified the prosperity of the 1920s throughout the country. In addition to its stylistic importance, the Ideal Building represents the most noteworthy period in the long career of prominent Birmingham architect D.O. Whilldin. During the 1920s he designed some of downtown Birmingham's most decorative commercial buildings: The Florentine Building, 111 19^th Street North, 1920 2^nd Avenue North, the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, and his own offices. The Ideal Building expresses Whilldin's characteristic love of exquisite surface decoration, his careful attention to detail, and also a mannerist tendency seen in some of his buildings, specifically the northern section of his own architectural office and, in the Ideal Building, the slightly disarming contrast between the solid base, resembling heavy stone blocks, and the very attenuated twisted columns and delicate details of the upper floors.

Building Description

The Ideal Department Store Building (1928-29) is a six-story brick structure located at 111 19^th Street North in downtown Birmingham. Significant exterior details include a highly ornamental glazed terra cotta facade with handsome spiraled columns topped by classical capitals; a decorative bracketed cornice with classical influences above the storefront as well as above the sixth floor arched windows; and pressed brick turns the corner into the alley, decorated with terra cotta scrolls and medallions. The storefront is terra cotta with a massive recessed signage area with classical details flanked with terra cotta cartouches. The storefront was modernized in 1939 to include the addition of Carrara glass.

Each floor measures 40' x 100' in addition to a full basement. The interior features wood floors throughout varying in condition from good to worn and patched except for the first floor, plaster ceilings and walls in varying states of repair, a mezzanine at the rear of the first floor, and wood-framed windows.