Long before the docks and rails remade Mobile’s riverfront, a cramped, hard-lived district known as Spanish Alley sat in the shadow of the city’s old waterfront. Set between Monroe and Eslava streets, running east from Royal Street toward the river, the neighborhood earned a reputation that lingered in Mobile’s memory long after the last shanty was gone.
Where the alley actually stood is a question collectors of old Mobile lore have wrestled with for generations. Joseph A. Marques, who studied the city’s old streets, described it as an alley connecting Water and Commerce streets, within the block between Eslava and Monroe. Old maps show Monroe Street once reaching the river before being cut off at Water Street; that would place the alley roughly 150 feet north of what is now Eslava Street. However it is mapped, the name gradually spread, over the course of the late nineteenth century, to cover the whole district.
The alley was about 40 feet wide, lined with shanties, some two stories tall, leaning against each other like two drunks going home. They were dingy and unpainted, home to numerous families of Spanish fishermen and longshoremen, often a family to a room. It was, by all accounts, no place for an afternoon stroll. Anyone traveling the alley at night carried a club or a revolver; even years after it was demolished, the peccable reputation of the place hung like a cloud over the district.
Accounts collected by Mobile’s historians — including the writing of Caldewell Delaney in “Craighead’s Mobile” — tell how the district’s history ended: a fire razed the block, according to the tradition, and not long after, the steel rails of a railroad were laid across the ground, and the river piers gradually swallowed the point where the alley once met the water.
By the early twentieth century the alley proper was gone, its name surviving only in the fading legends of old Mobile and in the pages of the histories that tried — and sometimes disagreed — to pin down exactly where it had been.