I came up in flat country, in a place with a fierce sense of itself that nobody outside it could locate on a map, so I recognize Huntsville immediately and I suspect that is why the assignment landed with me.
The city passed Birmingham to become the largest in Alabama, and outside the state the news registered as a curiosity. That gap, between what a place is and what people assume it to be, is the most interesting thing about it and the hardest thing to write about honestly, because the temptation is to argue.
Huntsville’s economy was built on federal aerospace and defense work, and that gave it something almost no city its size in this region has: a large, stable population of people with graduate degrees and salaries to match, compounding quietly for sixty years. It also gave the city an international population that arrived for the work and stayed for the ordinary reasons people stay anywhere.
What the money has not yet produced is a reputation. Nashville exports an idea of itself. Atlanta exports several. Huntsville exports engineering, and engineering does not travel as a story.
There is a melancholy in that which I find familiar. A place can be entirely successful and still not be seen, and the not being seen becomes part of what the place is, the way a house takes the shape of the family that lived in it longest. Whether Huntsville wants to be seen is a question I have not heard anyone there answer the same way twice.
This piece will ask it, and will look at what the city stands to lose if the answer turns out to be yes.