The newspaper has a green light to demolish its former headquarters for a parking lot. (John Morse, Bhamwiki.com)

A former newspaper building in Birmingham, Ala., soon will be old news.

Earlier this month, the city's design review committee, which denied a demolition permit for the 1917 Birmingham News building in October, approved plans for the demolition of the old Birmingham News building. On Apr. 11, the committee, satisfied that owner Victor Hanson III had met the conditions for approval, voted 5-2 to allow him to replace the building with a surface parking lot.

The four-story brick building sits across the street from the newspaper's new 110,000-square-foot building, completed last year. "When they first came to us for the new building, the exciting thing about the plan was that the new building was going to be sympathetic to the old building," says Sam Frasier, a member of the committee. "Now they're tearing down the original building."

The committee believed it could no longer delay demolition, even though building lies in an urban renewal district, which gives it the power to deny the permit indefinitely. "We thought we had been obligated to approve it in March because it had been six months," Frazier says.

Linda Nelson of the Jefferson County Historical Commission says that she and many other preservationists in the city are disappointed by not only the city's approval of plans, but also by Hanson's reluctance to consider alternatives. "Not allowing the destruction of buildings to create surface parking is Urban Design 101," she says. While Birmingham has a determined preservation community, "it can't get very far unless you have an active city authority" to back it up, she says.

At the same time, the issue has received almost no press in the Birmingham News, leaving some with the impression that the preservation community is not interested in the building. "We all appear to be standing around wringing our hands doing nothing," Nelson says.

Several preservationists have approached Hanson offering help, including National Trust President Richard Moe, who wrote Hanson a letter in October expressing his encouragement for keeping the building and offering advice.

Charlie Beavers, an attorney for the newspaper, says that the company originally intended to rehab the building for its own use but decided to build a new headquarters when it found it unfeasible. Selling the property was also difficult because of its proximity to the newspaper's production facilities, making necessary to retain access to the property. "If that building could have been rehabbed, the News would have done it," he says.

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