Downtown Fairhope has a new landmark, and it lives in a space most people used to hurry through. The new Fairhope Art Alley — running between the public parking garage and the rear of the buildings along the north side of Fairhope Avenue, behind Bone and Barrel, Sage Restaurant and the Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce — has been transformed from a plain service corridor into a public gallery, with murals by Hannah Legg and sculptures by Bruce Larson turning a parking problem into a destination.
The idea is practical as well as beautiful: dress up the long-neglected alley, make the free parking garage more inviting, and ease downtown Fairhope’s parking crunch. The city even added a public restroom near the Church Street entrance. Legg’s murals, painted on the backs of the buildings, do the rest.
“As Fairhopian as you can be without being born here”
Legg’s own path runs through three countries before it reaches Fairhope Avenue. An international baby, she moved from Miami to Italy to New Orleans before settling in Fairhope at age 6. “I’m as Fairhopian as you can be without being born here,” she says. “It’s a pretty great place to grow up!” Her father, George Legg, works in Mobile with Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, providing classification and compliance services to the marine and offshore industries — precision work that fascinates her from an artist’s remove.
The artistic lineage comes from her grandfather, a classically trained British watercolorist, printmaker and portraitist who taught art and made hand-drawn birthday and Christmas cards each year for his grandchildren — cards the family still keeps. “My grandfather was a very early influence, and my parents were always supportive,” Legg says. She drew constantly as a child but never considered art a career until college.
Swimmer first, artist second
Before she was a muralist, Legg was a swimmer — “even more than being an artist, I wanted to be a swimmer. It was my life.” She swam four years for Fairhope High School, captained the team as a senior, and has since been inducted into the FHS Swimming Hall of Fame. Her sister Helen was the Alabama State Champion diver four years running.
When college came, her mother — a 20-year fitness instructor — steered her toward the Savannah College of Art and Design with a persuasive argument: SCAD was the only art school with a swim team. Legg visited, fell in love with Savannah, and swam all four years on a full ride while majoring in illustration with a minor in costume design, the latter inspired by her mother’s theater training in London.
A mermaid on a chalkboard
After graduation she came home and did what Fairhope graduates do: waited tables at Sunset Pointe for Panini Pete and Nick Dimario, worked briefly at the Grand Hotel, and tended bar at The Supper Club. Then Pete asked her to paint a mermaid on the chalkboard at Sunset Pointe. “That kicked off my mural painting,” she says. More murals followed at Pete’s restaurants, freelance graphic design picked up, and her reputation grew. Two years at Jam Group Studio, a boutique marketing shop — tree-removal companies one day, CBD store campaigns the next — sharpened her range before murals took over.
“I thought I was going to struggle, but the same principles of doing illustrations apply to murals as well,” she says. “I got up on that ladder and never looked back. It’s very physical, which I like.” Her commissions increase every year, priced by the square foot with supplies included, depending on detail, location and wall surface.
For the Art Alley project, Legg added a credential no art school offers: she became a certified boom and scissor lift operator, taking a course in Pensacola with her boyfriend Jesse, the award-winning mixologist who runs the bar at Sunset Pointe. “I figured if I was going to be up off the ground, I needed to know how to run the equipment.” The alley murals took about 24 days to complete.
Wildlife, jellyfish and weddings
Legg’s favorite subjects are wildlife — jellyfish above all, her favorite things in the world — and her illustration work extends to Soiree Signatures, the Fairhope invitations and stationery studio, where she draws wedding crests, monograms and pet portraits. “We do anything creative that walks through the door. It’s lots of fun.” Asked what she does in her free time, she doesn’t hesitate: “I draw.”
Commissioning a mural takes about two weeks from first conversation to painted wall: describe the idea, and Legg brainstorms, sketches, prepares a digital mood board, refines the design to exactly what the client wants, preps the surface and goes to work. Her family — a digital-artist brother, a fashion-designer sister in Florence, a theater-trained mother — is, by her description, “super close, crazy creative, and very athletic.”
As Fairhope grows — as everyone always knew it would, she says — Legg thinks about how the growth happens. “It’s a picturesque place, and growth is good, but how it’s done is important.” The Art Alley is one answer: take a corridor nobody used, and make it the most colorful walk in town.