Long before Google Street View, an independent website called WalkaboutCity.com set out to let visitors “be there before you get there” in downtown Mobile, quietly building one of the earliest block-by-block virtual tours of the city’s core.
The site, created around the turn of the millennium by then-Mobile resident Joann Okuzono-Perkins, focused most of its attention on Lower Dauphin Street but also let visitors browse other downtown blocks and, in some cases, step inside individual businesses through interior photos. It was an ambitious undertaking for the era: interactive maps that let users click their way up and down city blocks at street level, at a time when most residential internet connections were still measured in kilobits per second.
A record of the ‘String of Pearls’ era
The tour arrived during what locals came to call downtown Mobile’s “String of Pearls” period, a stretch of the late 1990s and early 2000s when a cluster of restaurants, shops and entertainment venues anchored the blocks around Dauphin Street and Fort Condé. Meta-data and archived pages from the site reference businesses such as Wintzell’s Oyster House, the Original Oyster House, and other dining and retail spots that defined the district at the time, alongside civic landmarks like the Mobile Zoo and points along Government Street.
Because the project documented storefronts and interiors as they actually existed at that moment, it inadvertently became something more valuable with time: a preserved record of a downtown business landscape that has since changed considerably. Several of the establishments captured in the tour have since closed or been replaced, making the site a useful, if accidental, historical archive.
Why it still matters
Amateur, independently built projects like WalkaboutCity.com rarely set out to be historical documents. But two decades on, this one offers a rare street-level view of downtown Mobile from a period when the city’s revitalization was still taking shape, giving historians, urban planners and curious residents a way to compare what downtown looked like then against what stands there now.