Birmingham, MI

Shain Park serves as Birmingham’s main commons, with Marshall Fredericks’s sculpture Freedom of the Human Spirit at its center and public events held around it. Birmingham is an Oakland County city on the Woodward Corridor and a northern suburb of Detroit; its 2020 population was 21,813. The area became part of land ceded to the United States under the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. Settlers organized the First United Methodist Church in 1821 and initially met in Elijah Willets’s tavern. The congregation’s 1839 building is now the city’s oldest church structure. Birmingham maintains more than 20 parks, with facilities ranging from playing fields and courts to nature trails and wooded areas.