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Article: Cabana Hotel

The Cabana Hotel(Or Leer Tower) is a currently vacant building in the downtown "Fountain Heights" area of Downtown Birmingham,Al. It has been abandoned since 1983 but has received large amount of interest. The Thomas Jefferson Hotel (As it was originally named) was built and finished in 1928 and became the premier hotel of Birmingham. Only the highest of class could afford to stay there. To impress high-class guests, the management got an elite orchestra from New York City to play in the grand ballroom for the first few weeks after opening. Many stars stayed there, including Mickey Rooney, and George Wallace had a penthouse type suite where he stayed during his trips to Birmingham. In the 1940's the bottom floor (Which originally had retail space for around 5 stores) was renovated, which expanded the lobby through retail space to give it a grand feel, many retail stores where moved to the basement. It was renovated numerous times between then and the 1960's, with small aesthetic changes, including adding state-of-the-art Stainless-Steel appliances in the restaurant kitchen, an expensive and modern move for the time. During the 1960's the side of Birmingham that the Hotel rested on had become a haven for criminals and the homeless, leaving the hotel without any high-class visitors. By the late 1970's the Thomas Jefferson had been taken over by a cheaper chain of hotels called "Cabana". By 1978 the hotel had become $200 a month apartments until being deemed "uninhabitable" in 1983, which it has set vacant since.

By 1990, the building had started seriously falling apart on the inside. The Homeless had moved in and started opening up windows and scattering furniture everywhere, ripping up wallpaper, and sleeping on the beds that where left when the buildings tenants where all evicted. One heathen even decided to scratch off the george wallace sign in his suite. Surprisingly the terra-cotta facing has not fallen off that badly, leaving it un-needed to put a fence/wooden inclosure up(as seen in the Brown-Marx Building, and the City Federal Building before it's renovation). The building also once housed a radio station on it's top floor.

In 2005 Leer Corp. owner David Leer bought the tower and sought out to start a $20 million renovation to convert the buildings into upscale condos, ranging in price from around $260,000-$530,000. By then that side of Birmingham was the most booming part of town, and the safest, leaving much hope for the building. Delays kept close to any work from being done, including when some vagrants stole the generators for the building, leaving the building powerless. Leer still claimed that the building would be finished by early 2009, it never happened. In July 2008 the building went in to foreclosure and once again is empty.

In August 2009 Watts Realty, a Birmingham based real estate company, got ahold of the building and posted signs in the under-lying annex. The Building is currently for-sale for around $2,000,000, though it would cost around $7,000,000 to remove asbestos and mold. The mold has come from condensation coming from the buildings basement, which flooded around 2004 from and underground stream, which has brought thousands of mosquitos to the building. Hopefully the building will be bought and redone, but until then, all people can do is watch it deteriorate.