Head Hunter Beauty Salon
Tuscumbia AL, 2024.
Walker Percy Belongs to Birmingham, and That Mint Julep
It’s a mystery to me why Birmingham doesn’t claim Walker Percy, or doesn’t claim him prouder, as its literary son.
When we talk state-wide, there’s Nelle Harper Lee, Truman Capote (loving that those two belong to Monroeville), but ask about Birmingham specifically and it will take most people a sec. Diane McWhorter. Fannie Flagg. Dennis Covington. Sena Jeter Naslund. John Green for sure. But I think Walker Percy doesn’t make most people’s list.
Percy was born right here, at St. Vincent’s Hospital, on May 28, 1916. He grew up and went to school here, lost family and was changed in ways that showed up in his novels.
When the Percys — and they were already a prominent family — came to B’ham in 1886, they married into the DeBardeleben family. Now, Walker Percy the grandfather of our author Walker Percy, got busy representing Birmingham banking and industry, was a founding member of the Country Club of Birmingham (best fried chicken in town, btw), and his portrait still hangs there today, marking his term as club president in 1909, and his son LeRoy (so, younger Walker’s father) was president of the Club in 1925.
CCB, 2023
Now our Walker’s parents, LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan “Mattie Sue” Phinizy, moved into elder Walker’s beautiful, large Gothic home at the corner of Highland Avenue and Arlington Avenue, and I think that’s mayyyyybe — but don’t take this as fact because I’m not 100% — where the Cadence Bank now stands, across from the Chevron. That’s the intersection with Temple Beth-El. If you know for certain, please tell me.
And as a further aside, just this summer we’ve lost the very nice art deco bank building a few blocks from there to build…probably parking.
Back to the home at Highland and Arlington, when our author Walker was an infant, his grandfather ended things by his own hand, in the attic. It was LeRoy that found him.
They moved to Mountain Brook, close to the CCB, in a home designed by Hugh Martin, who’s to thank for the design of the Linn-Henley, the Bromberg’s store downtown, and Munger Hall at Birmingham-Southern, among others. Walker attended Birmingham University School, which is now Altamont School.
The Linn-Henley Research Library, 2024
In 1929, LeRoy ended his life in the Mountain Brook home, and in the attic, just as his father had. Walker’s mother moved them to Athens, Georgia to be with her family, then she died when her car went off a bridge near Leland, Mississippi, which Walker considered the third of those kinds of intentional deaths in his family.
from 2005, when it was in the Greenville, Mississippi cemetery
Another sidenote: I mentioned this back in May but the LeRoy Percy monument in the Greenville, Mississippi cemetery has been moved to the Mississippi Museum of Art. This isn’t Walker’s father LeRoy Pratt Percy, but William Alexander Percy’s father, LeRoy Percy who went to Sewanee then UVA, then came back to the Delta to be a lawyer and politician.
The Percys are a people who have a penchant for reusing names. There are multiple LeRoys, the mother and son who share the family name Phinizy, the grandfather and our author Walker. Lots of families do this, it’s just important when talking about their family to keep things like “which LeRoy” straight.
Walker was then 13, and he and his two younger brothers, Roy and Phinizy, were taken in by their father’s first cousin, William Alexander Percy, “Uncle Will,” who was at that time a bachelor lawyer and poet living in Greenville, Mississippi. Walker made life-long friends with Shelby Foote and it must have been an incredible literary-social circle. In 1941, Uncle Will published Lanterns on the Levee (here on Bookshop, on Amazon).
One funny story about Walker and Shelby was that they wanted to visit Faulkner so they drove over to Oxford and Shelby Foote had to do all the talking because Walker was so star-struck.
Rowan Oak, 2024
Another bit, from Jim Brown:
One of the amusing stories that circulated around the English Department at Carolina was about Percy taking his freshman English placement test. He had just read Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” and wrote his entire essay in one long paragraph without punctuation. He was promptly placed into a class for slow learners and was told that he needed a lot of help to pass English composition.
Flying through things a bit, Percy went on to medical school at Columbia, contracted TB, had worlds of time to read philosophy, converted to Catholicism, decided he was better geared to be a writer, and his The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1961.
By the 1970s he was teaching in the English Dept at Loyola (brother Phinizy was a law professor for 30+ years at Tulane) and in 1976 was approached there by John Kennedy Toole’s mother Thelma, who was relentless about having her late son — JKT also died the way others in Walker’s family died — published, begging him to read A Confederacy of Dunces (here on Bookshop, on Amazon). Some bits about that from a previous post here.
He didn’t just read it, he was instrumental in having it published, and in 1980 LSU Press released it. Walker Percy went so far as to write the foreward. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
The New Orleans Historic Collection, one of the finest museums, and free, in the city, has one of those first 2500 copies signed: “May 9, 1980. A merited contribution to the Historic New Orleans Collection, John Kennedy Toole’s mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole.”
Walker wrote six novels and several essay collections before he died in 1990.
And with that, a drink.
Now, this mint julep recipe below isn’t originally Walker’s, it’s his Uncle Will’s, who wrote this out in Lanterns on the Levee.
Walker used Will’s directions as a postscript to his 1957 essay “Bourbon, Neat“. That piece is SO GOOD.
The recipe:
You need excellent bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly — and here is the trick in the procedure — crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top.
Et voila, we made it. Cheers.
This Week’s Various, June 26 2026
Weekly notes on Southern art, architecture, food, and travel
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
The Henry Ford Museum in Deerborn, Michigan, from a 2021 visit
The Jackson House, associated with MLK and voting rights, has been moved to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and is open for visitors:
The former Alabama home where Martin Luther King Jr. and fellow activists mapped out strategy for the historic Selma voting-rights marches has been painstakingly rebuilt at the grounds of the famed The Henry Ford Museum, giving visitors a new way to step inside one of the movement’s most consequential chapters.
According to The Associated Press, the 3,000-square-foot Jackson House officially reopened on Friday, June 12, in Greenfield Village, where it now stands among dozens of preserved historic structures. Hundreds gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony led by museum president Patricia Mooradian and Jawana Jackson, whose parents owned the home in Selma. The residence was purchased by the museum in 2023, carefully dismantled piece by piece, transported more than 800 miles to Michigan, and reconstructed using original materials and artifacts.
On the porch at Rowan Oak, from a 2024 visit
The William Faulkner Heritage Corridor is a a historical conservation effort connecting Ripley, New Albany, and Oxford with their connections to William Faulkner. The project was presented to the Ripley City Council earlier this month.
…back in Alabama, the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, from 2014
At the NYT, Touring the Gold Coast Mansions that Inspired ‘The Great Gatsby’ includes mention of the home Scott and Zelda lived in Long Island.
This was the state of the building in 2005 — and this is how it looks now
Natchez’ controversial restaurant thanks to its name and building design, Mammy’s Cupboard, will be renamed The Cupboard and move to another address by September.
Tennessee’s only Frank Lloyd Wright home, in Chattanooga, is on the market.
The Old Courthouse Museum, the model for TKAM the film, from a 2015 visit
This September, Virginia Samford Theatre in Birmingham will be debuting “Growing up with Atticus“:
VST launches the theatre’s centennial season with the world premiere of a new play by Mary Badham and Cecilia Peck, daughter of Gregory Peck. Growing up With Atticus explores the legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird and the power of art to effect change. Through personal stories, film clips, and live conversation, they reflect on the man behind the role and the values that continue to resonate across generations. Both nostalgic and deeply moving, this event celebrates storytelling, legacy, and the enduring power of empathy.
Lots of summer fun — I hope you’re enjoying too! xoxo!
21Cs, Does Fat Bat Really Need To Be There Exactly, and Who Else Does This
I guess…I guess have a weakness for hotel chains that are weirdly specific.
Brent and I are planning a trip to Bentonville to see the newly-expanded Crystal Bridges for later this year, and of course, I want to stay at the 21C Museum Hotel again. These are among my favorites in general, not so much because the rooms themselves are incredible in any certain way, but it does feel like you’re having Night at the Museum because the overall space literally is a museum. And it’s open all hours. So you can decide that you’d prefer to linger over the art at midnight rather than two in the afternoon. It’s a thing.
Well, I say that the rooms aren’t necessarily that special, but some of the hotels have themed rooms. In Louisville, they have “Asleep in the Cyclone” which is built as an installation by artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe.
Some of the 21Cs have been rebranded. Right now, the 21Cs are:
From a 2014 visit: Yoan Capote’s In Tran/sit, above. And below, Virginie Barre’s Fat Bat which overlooks things in the fitness room
Does Fat Bat literally hovering over guests in the exercise room seem a bit heavy (sigh) – handed in the messaging
From a 2016 visit, Werner Reiterer’s outdoor chandelier; Astrid Krogh’s Lightmail
From a 2023 visit, the Durham location is especially nice because you can just go hang out in the bank vault:
art-wise, Vibha Galhotra’s Earth 1978 was on view
From a 2019 visit, the red Lincoln limousine out front; Daniel Jackson’s The Thousand Yard Stare; Virgil Marti’s Landscape Wallpaper; a terrible pic I took of Anne Peabody’s Wheel of Fortune
and I think that means I’ve been to all but St Louis.
When the boys were little, they loved the 21C penguins — each hotel had its signature color penguin — and you could move them around the hotel as you wish. That green one? He’s with us.
21Cs that have been rebranded include Chicago, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and the one in Nashville that we stayed at in 2018 (sidenote: Nashville needs a TON more hotels because 1/ they’re mostly super cookie-cutter and by that I mean especialllyyyy the nicest ones and 2/ they’re so expensive for what they are):
Below — Paul Rucker’s Soundless; George Legrady’s At the Bar; Maynard Monrow’s Self-Portrait
And this is the Sanctuary 21 Artist Suite that could be booked — it was designed by Sebastiaan Bremer and Josephine Wiggs, and included a recording studio:
There was a time when I wanted to visit every one of the 21Cs, and I think it would be fun to visit St Louis just to check all those boxes (I really hardly ever get to STL, though — I think twice in the last ten years, once doing part of Route 66 and the other was last year to do a college tour of Wash U). I used to also want to visit all of the Graduate Hotels just because they’re so immersive, especially when they used to be designed by Andrew Alford, and there was more like a dozen of them, but they’ve been purchased by Hilton and they’re up to 35 locations now.
What other ultra-themed hotels with a few locations do you know that might be fun to visit? Please lemme know. xoxo
Moshe Safdie, Crystal Bridges, In Birmingham Too
Interested to know: at the end of the recent Vanity Fair article about the Moshe Safdie-designed expansion of Crystal Bridges, there’s mention that one of the auction items, going fishing with Alice Walton, sells at $1M. Alice is quoted as saying “What you don’t know is you get to come to a Moshe Safdie house — there’s only three in the world.”
My understanding is that Alice Walton is back at the original Fay Jones-designed Walton home in Bentonville, so I imagine this confirms that she had Safdie build another structure on her family property — I think it’s the guest lodge.
Above, a model of Safdie’s design for Crystal Bridges, from my 2014 visit, below the actual building at that visit
At McGill, there’s a listing of Safdie projects and there are a few residential designs, though most went unbuilt. I think one is his home in Jerusalem, one is a home for a disabled person in Canada (not sure if it still exists), a poolhouse turned ummmmm house-house in Quebec, and even a home here in Birmingham.
Even more interesting about the home in Birmingham is that it was built for Alston Callahan, as in Callahan Eye Hospital, part of UAB. And just like we were talking about the other day, that’s the hospital with the huge Agam:
Here thanks to Realtor are more pics of the Safdie home in Birmingham, It was taken down and replaced with another home several years ago.
Callahan also had famous architect (and fellow Alabamian) Paul Rudolph design a home for his site on Red Mountain, but chose Safdie. Here’s the Rudolph concept.
The Pearl
The Pearl Restaurant
Oysters, Kansas City Steaks, Seafoods
New Orleans LA, 2023.
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