Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson joined developer Mike Cowart and Mobile City Councilman Levon Manzie Wednesday morning for a groundbreaking ceremony marking the start of construction on a new 93-room Hilton Garden Inn at the corner of Conception and St. Francis streets in downtown Mobile.
Crews were already tearing up asphalt on the former parking lot at the site as officials gathered to celebrate the project’s launch. “This corner is a premier site in the city,” Stimpson said during the event.
Manzie described the hotel as part of a continuing wave of investment reshaping downtown Mobile. “The vibrancy and revitalization is not stopping,” he said. “It’s ever-increasing.”
The hotel is being developed by Cowart Hospitality Services, led by Mike Cowart, who has also built two other downtown hotel properties, the Hampton Inn and the Candlewood Suites. Cowart said the new Hilton Garden Inn will be custom designed with a contemporary interior and will include an upscale cocktail lounge intended to give downtown visitors and residents another option for evening entertainment.
The site carries some history for Mobile’s music and festival scene. The parking lot had previously hosted one of the main stages for BayFest, the city’s long-running music festival, and the start of hotel construction forced organizers to rework the festival’s footprint for that year’s event. BayFest founder Bobby Bostwick stopped short of calling the change a downsizing, but said the festival board would need to make adjustments to accommodate construction on the site of the event’s R&B stage, potentially replacing the smaller gospel stage with R&B programming and spreading gospel music across other stages instead.
BayFest organizers had also been scheduled to give a presentation to the Mobile City Council the day before the groundbreaking, but a lengthy council meeting pushed that presentation back. Bostwick said additional presentations were planned before both the City Council and the Mobile County Commission in the weeks that followed, along with other festival announcements, including what he described as “something we’ve never done in 21 years.”
A ribbon-cutting for the new hotel was slated for August of the following year. The project reflects a broader trend of hospitality investment in downtown Mobile, where a string of new hotels has opened over the past decade as the city has worked to draw more visitors, conventions and residents back into its historic core.