MOBILE — Has the Mobile Convention Center earned its keep? Two longtime observers of the city took up the question in a published exchange, and the answer they arrived at was less a verdict than a portrait of a city that has never quite been able to decide what it is.
The Ledger Nobody Has Seen
Neither participant was willing to brand the building a white elephant without the books in hand. One, a veteran of the hospitality and visitor industry, laid out the arithmetic he would want to perform: weigh the bricks-and-mortar cost of the structure against the dollars that flowed into Mobile’s economy because it exists, applying a conservative economic multiplier — he favors 2-to-1 — rather than the extravagant ones consultants tend to reach for.
Then, he said, one would have to add the intangibles: civic pride, and the way the center may have catalyzed other downtown redevelopment. Pressed hard enough, he allowed, he would eventually concede that building the convention center downtown was a good idea.
His counterpart was more skeptical about the investment but unreserved about the architecture. He calls the building beautiful and says walking through it lifts his spirits — a feeling he contrasts sharply with the sensation of entering Government Plaza, where he reports something closer to dread, “a foreboding that something Kafkaesque is just around the corner.”
The two buildings, he notes, went up in roughly the same era, in roughly the same part of downtown, at enormous public expense. One inspires. The other deflates. He confesses he has never understood how that happened.
“The City With Perpetual Promise”
The harder question is what the convention center has actually produced. The hospitality veteran recalled that in his professional dealings he heard plenty of praise for the building itself — usually followed by a variation on the same complaint: Why can’t they get their act together and attract visitors?
He expects that to change, and he pins his hopes on two things then coming into view: cruise ship traffic and the restored Battle House hotel.
The diagnosis he offers is one Mobile has heard before, delivered with affection. Charleston and Savannah are beautiful Southern cities. New Orleans has its own peculiar magic. Richmond has the Confederacy. Mobile, he says, is pretty — but it is like the sister in a large family for whom excuses must be made. He credits City Councilman Clinton Johnson with the phrase that pins it best: Mobile, “the city with perpetual promise.”
His half-serious prescription is literary. What Mobile needs, he argues, is for the convention and visitors bureau to commission a book in the vein of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — the Savannah bestseller that turned that city into a pilgrimage site. Put in enough sex, drugs and crime, he says, and Mobile will not be able to keep the tourists away. He nominates Mobile novelist Winston Groom for the assignment.
His partner in the conversation declines the job himself on grounds of self-preservation: write the book he has in mind about Mobile, he says, and he would have to relocate to the next cave over from Osama bin Laden. He also notes, drily, that people speak of the $89,000-a-year mayor’s job as service above and beyond the call.
The Ferries
The conversation turns to the perennial proposal for high-speed passenger ferries linking Mobile with the Eastern Shore and the wider Gulf Coast.
The verdict is sympathetic and gloomy. Ferries would be wonderful, the hospitality veteran says — but first the region needs bodies to put in them. He imagines that in fifty years, once another 50,000 residents have migrated from Mobile to Baldwin County, commuters might genuinely fill the boats. In the meantime, he says, if the public goes into the project understanding it as public transportation and therefore worthy of subsidy, in the same way highways are subsidized, then let it proceed. “They couldn’t hurt.”
The Road Not Taken
The most pointed passage is a piece of unabashed hindsight. Mobile, one argues, should have pursued something smaller and more demonstrably useful to its own residents before attempting a convention center — a reimagined waterfront park, perhaps, with a fishing pier and boat docks; something local families would use every weekend. First win over the home folks, he says, then conquer the world.
The counterargument is offered by his own conversation partner, and it is a fair one. Mobile at the time was emerging from a period of municipal corruption, and voters wanted visible economic results, not a park. Downtown and the areas around it were considerably dicier then in terms of public safety, and it is not clear the public would have embraced a waterfront park in that climate. The idea, he concedes, makes far more sense today than it did then.
Which is, in its way, the whole conversation in miniature: two men looking at the same skyline, agreeing on almost everything, and unable to say for certain whether the biggest thing Mobile ever built was salvation or snake eyes.