The Alabama State Port Authority and the City of Mobile scheduled a ribbon cutting for Monday, June 14, at 2 p.m. to officially open Arlington Park, the city’s newest bay front park.
Mayor Sam Jones, members of the Mobile City Council and the public were expected to attend. Area kayak enthusiasts planned a demonstration of the park’s new kayak and canoe launch as part of the ceremony.
Public access to the water
For a city built on a bay and a river, Mobile has historically offered its residents surprisingly few places to simply walk down to the water. Much of the waterfront is given over to working port facilities, shipyards, rail lines and industry — the economic engine of the region, but not a shoreline the public can use.
Arlington Park was built to close a piece of that gap. The kayak and canoe launch in particular signaled an intent to make the park usable rather than merely scenic, giving paddlers a place to put in on Mobile Bay without driving to the causeway or across to the Eastern Shore.
A partnership with the port
That the Alabama State Port Authority co-sponsored the park is itself worth noting. The port and the city have not always found their interests aligned on questions of waterfront land use, and a jointly opened public park represented a form of cooperation that had been in short supply in earlier decades.
The Port Authority operates the deepwater terminals and inland docks that make Mobile one of the busiest ports on the Gulf, and its footprint shapes what is and is not possible along the city’s shoreline.
Opening in a difficult season
The timing gave the ceremony an undercurrent. In mid-June of 2010, the Deepwater Horizon well was still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, and coastal Alabama was bracing for oil. Beaches to the south were fielding cancellations, the seafood fleets were tied up, and the mood along the water was anything but celebratory.
A new park on the bay front, with a launch for small boats, offered something modest and local against that backdrop: a reminder that the working waterfront and the recreational one can coexist, and that Mobile Bay remains, for the people who live around it, a place to be out on and not only to worry about.
Attending
The ribbon cutting was open to the public. Organizers directed questions to the Port Authority and to the city’s communications office.
For a city whose relationship to its own waterfront has been debated for the better part of a century — through the building of the Bankhead Tunnel, the construction of the Cochrane Bridge, the rise and fall of downtown wharves, and the later development of the cruise terminal and Cooper Riverside Park — each new stretch of publicly accessible shoreline counts as a small correction of a long imbalance.