Thirty-seven years ago a Birmingham developer made a bold proposal for what the Magic City’s skyline might look like in the 21st century.

Shepherd Centre would have built a 68-story office tower between First and Second Avenues South, along with a 42-story tower, near 20th and 21st Streets. The project had a preliminary price tag of up to $200 million.

A Reddit post over the weekend mentioned the project, drawing questions from users about what happened to the proposal. According to newspaper accounts at the time, it was ambitious even for the days when it seemed skyscrapers were going up each year in downtown Birmingham.

Both of the Shepherd Centre structures, if they had been built, would be taller than Birmingham’s tallest current building, the 454-foot Shipt Tower, which at that time was only a year old when the proposal was made.

And for the time, the main building would have been taller than any other building in the South, excluding several in Texas, according to contemporary reports.

Shepherd Centre was proposed in 1987 by Everett Shepherd Jr., the man behind Brookwood Village and other projects in the Birmingham area. It reflected a time long before telecommuting and would have easily dwarfed anything in downtown Birmingham at the time.

David Fleming, CEO of REV Birmingham, said you have to admire Shepherd’s vision.

“I remember it well,” he said. “On the one hand it’s really great that he had that kind of confidence in, and vision for, downtown Birmingham. On the other, I think the reason we never saw it was that there never was a market for that much office square footage in that time.”

Designed by Michael Waldheim of Gresham, Smith and Partners, the buildings would have encompassed roughly 2 million square feet of office space, along with retail and residential. To put that in perspective, that’s a third as big as the current total space for Birmingham’s Central Business District.

When Shepherd put forward the project, he didn’t have an anchor, though he did propose it as a site for the Kirklin Clinic and State Farm. The clinic, though, had in mind a site closer to UAB, and State Farm moved to its own headquarters. Shepherd died in 1997.

Shepherd kept the dream alive as late as 1991, when he proposed several high-rise buildings along 20th Street South.

“Looking to the future of Midtown,” one advertisement stated. But even as this proposal was unveiled, companies were migrating to suburban office parks. The downtown market already had space to spare.

Shepherd Centre was a creature of a time when corporations looking were for large scale, corporate downtown presences. Mergers and acquisitions, and the recession of 2000, did the rest in consigning the project to oblivion.

Fleming said a project of that size would have required a commitment from a very large corporate entity. “Probably a bigger user than any user in Birmingham than existed at the time.”

And if the buildings had been built, Birmingham would probably be looking at a much larger glut in available downtown office space, Fleming said.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, in the first quarter of 2024, the Birmingham metro area had an office vacancy rate of 15.7%.

Of the five different regions making up the area, Birmingham’s central business district had a vacancy rate of 14.3%, while Midtown recorded a 7.2% rate. The metro area’s rate was better than many other U.S. cities. Atlanta, Houston, Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago are all at 25% or higher.