Downtown revivals do not announce themselves. They accumulate, one lease and one scaffold at a time, until one morning the street looks different. In late April 2008, the Downtown Mobile Alliance’s Carol Hunter supplied a ledger of what was accumulating.
A bank in the Athelstan Club
Coastal Bank and Trust was moving into 3,100 square feet on the first floor of the Athelstan Club at 107 St. Francis Street.
The address carries weight. The Athelstan Club, founded in the nineteenth century, is among the oldest private clubs in the South, and its building has long been a fixture of the downtown business district near the waterfront. A bank taking ground-floor space in it was the kind of transaction that says, more persuasively than any press release, that a financial institution expects foot traffic and commerce on that block.
Condominiums on Dauphin
The Carriage Works condominiums at 709 Dauphin Street were nearing completion, with a model unit expected to be ready to view within a couple of weeks.
Residential conversion was the central bet of downtown Mobile’s revitalization in this period, and it was not a small one. For decades the district emptied at five o’clock. The theory behind projects like Carriage Works was that a downtown with residents would sustain the restaurants, groceries and shops that a downtown of offices alone cannot. The timing, in the spring of 2008, was uncomfortable. The national housing market was already deteriorating, and the condominium market along the Gulf Coast, which had run hot for years, was among the first sectors to feel it.
A facelift on Bienville Square
A major renovation continued at 159 and 161 Dauphin Street, two buildings overlooking Bienville Square. Each contained about 3,300 square feet, well suited for retail and office space, and both were expected to be ready in a few months.
Bienville Square, with its live oaks and its cast-iron fountain, is the historic center of the city, and the buildings that face it are among the most visible in Mobile. Restoring rather than replacing them reflected a preservation-minded approach to downtown redevelopment that has largely defined Mobile’s efforts since.
A calendar at the Bienville Club
The Bienville Club had a season of public events scheduled, a reminder that downtown’s recovery was social as much as commercial:
- Cinco de Mayo Buffet Lunch and Happy Hour, Monday, May 5
- Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre, “Murder at the Music Hall,” Saturday, May 10, 7-10 p.m.
- Armed Forces Day Lunch, Friday, May 16, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Women’s Wine Tour, Tuesday, May 20, 6-8 p.m.
The larger picture
The Downtown Mobile Alliance, the business improvement organization that compiled these notes, existed precisely to make this kind of accumulation visible. A single bank lease is not news. A bank lease plus a condominium project plus two restored storefronts plus a full events calendar, reported together, is an argument: that money was moving back toward the center of the city.
Seventeen years later, the argument looks largely vindicated. Dauphin Street is a functioning entertainment and dining district. Downtown residential occupancy grew. The historic building stock that Mobile chose to restore rather than demolish became one of the city’s genuine competitive advantages.
But it is worth remembering what the people compiling that ledger in April 2008 did not know. Within months, the credit markets would seize, construction lending would evaporate, and the recovery they were charting would slow to a crawl for several years. The buildings on Bienville Square got their facelift. The wider revival took longer than anyone reading that spring’s update would have guessed.