The old newspaper building at Government and Claiborne streets emerged in the spring of 2004 as the frontrunner to house Mobile County Probate Court operations on a temporary basis, while county officials worked out a permanent home for the court atop the newer courthouse annex.
The plan under discussion was ambitious and, in its way, a small act of civic surgery. The old courthouse bounded by Royal, Church and Government streets — a building then roughly 50 years old — was to be demolished. In its place would rise a downtown green space with a Mardi Gras theme, paid for with a mix of public and private money. The Hearin-Chandler Foundation was expected to play a prominent role in funding the park.
Why tear it down?
The arithmetic drove the decision. Removing asbestos from the old courthouse, officials said, could cost as much as $20 million — roughly the same price tag as adding three floors to the newer annex next door. Faced with spending the same money either to rehabilitate an aging building or to build fresh vertical space, the county leaned toward the latter.
The annex had been designed from the outset to accommodate a vertical expansion, which made the option practical. A bridge would connect the expanded annex to the larger Government Plaza to the west, knitting the county’s downtown operations together.
The orphan offices
The old courthouse was not sitting empty. It housed Probate Court along with a satellite office of the License Commission, the Board of Equalization and the Board of Registrars, among other functions — the kind of everyday government offices residents visit to record a deed, register to vote, contest a property assessment or renew a tag.
All of those operations would have to go somewhere while construction proceeded. County officials estimated the leased space would be occupied for roughly three years, and the county expected to take about 55,000 square feet in the old newspaper building. Smaller county functions would move along with Probate Court into the leased quarters.
Several buildings along Government Street were under consideration besides the former newspaper offices, including two old television station buildings — one at Government and Joachim, another at Government and Conception.
A building with a history
The old newspaper building carried its own local story. It had been given to the Center for the Living Arts by the newspaper’s parent company, and the arts organization was its owner at the time county officials began eyeing it as swing space. That a downtown property could pass from a newsroom to an arts nonprofit and then be considered for county courtrooms says something about how downtown Mobile’s inventory of large old buildings was being recycled in the early 2000s.
No firm timeline
Officials cautioned that no construction schedule had been set for the annex addition. Once work began, they said, it could take three or four years to complete — a horizon that, added to the planning and leasing stages, put the whole project years out.
That uncertainty was itself part of the story. Large public building projects in Mobile have a long history of arriving late and costing more than the first estimate, and county officials in 2004 were careful not to promise a completion date they might not meet.
The broader picture
The proposal fit into a larger effort, then well underway, to reshape downtown Mobile’s civic core. Government Plaza had already consolidated a great deal of city and county activity into a single modern complex. Turning the site of a demolished courthouse into a Mardi Gras-themed park would have added public open space to a district that had comparatively little of it, and would have reinforced the identity Mobile has long claimed as the birthplace of American Mardi Gras.
For the residents who used those offices, though, the practical question was simpler: where would they go to probate a will or register to vote while all this was going on? In May 2004, the answer being penciled in was a former newsroom on Government Street.