A poll taken 15 years ago showed a longing for a riverfront park in Mobile, and a place where people could gather near the city’s mostly industrial waterway.

“A few weighed in and said, ‘I’d like a waterfront (park) like Cooper Riverside Park to be my favorite park, but I don’t even think about it,’” recalled Carol Hunter, spokesperson with the Downtown Mobile Alliance. “Fifteen years ago, there really wasn’t much there.”

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Years later, the city’s riverfront includes a convention center, a museum, and a cruise terminal. Sandwiched in between the large venues is a 3-acre riverfront park hidden from Water Street.

It’s that park – Cooper Riverside Park – that holds a promising future. Among its biggest cheerleaders is the city’s mayor.

Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson, during a Q&A with the Alabama Media Group last week, named riverfront “activation” as among his top “legacy” projects, and one that he foresees coming together within the next two years.

It joins a lofty list of bigger picture developments the mayor specifically named: The development of Mobile International Airport, a large new bayfront park called Brookley by the Bay, the redevelopment of the Mobile Civic Center, and the construction of the Interstate 10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project.

“The highest probability, I believe, will be the airport in something that is started and completed (within the next few years),” said Stimpson, whose third term ends in 2025, but who also hinted he might seek a fourth term.

“Riverfront activation will be up there with the airport,” he added. “It could be completed by 2025.”

Baseball, Trains, restaurants

The fate of the riverfront’s activation depends on several elements, some of which could come together in the next 18 months:

• The installation of Heroes Park, highlighted with 9-foot-tall statues of the five Major League Baseball Hall of Famers who are native to Mobile, and Robert Brazile Jr., the city’s only homegrown member of the National Football League Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The park will serve as an entry into Cooper Riverside Park.
• The return of Amtrak to Mobile will result in a new train stop at the site of the former train station at 11 Government Street – the foot of Government and Water streets and adjacent to Cooper Riverside Park. Amtrak service is anticipated to return later this year with twice-daily trips between Mobile and New Orleans.
• The return of cruising to Mobile will occur in October with six- and eight-day excursions to Mexico, Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas aboard the Spirit, and city officials are angling to host events at the park while cruisers are in Mobile. One idea that has been floated is to hold mini-Mardi Gras parades through the park and along the riverfront.
• Africatown tourism will be activated with the July 8 opening of the Heritage House, and the beginning of water tours to Twelve Mile Island to the site where the hull of the Clotilda was discovered. The tours will start from GulfQuest, an underutilized museum adjacent to Cooper Riverside Park.
• Installation of a large tent at Cooper Riverside Park’s amphitheater to accommodate year-round entertainment. The city’s parks and recreation division already hosts a “Saturdays at the Coop!” events featuring music, food vendors and other entertainment.
• The potential of hosting pop up restaurants, or eateries inside a shipping container. Officials contend a need to create an attractive space to draw eateries to the city’s waterfront.

Heroes Park

Stimpson said the Heroes Park statues should be completed by the end of the year. They are being created by sculptor Brett Grill of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The development is a public-private collaboration and is assisted through $8 million allocated by Gov. Kay Ivey’s office last year from annual oil and gas leases from the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006 (GOMESA).

Aside from Brazile, the statues will also include Mobile natives who are enshrined in Cooperstown, N.Y.: Hank Aaron, who played primarily for the Braves organization from 1954-1976, and who was inducted in 1982; Willie McCovey, who played primarily for the Giants from 1959-1980 and who was inducted in 1989; Satchel Paige, who played in the Negro Leagues and in Major League Baseball from 1927-1965 and was inducted in 1971; Billy Williams, who played primarily for the Cubs from 1965-1976, and was inducted in 1987; and Ozzie Smith, who played primarily with the Cardinals from 1978-1996, and was inducted in 2002.

Hunter said the statues will be offer an eye-catching entrance into Cooper Riverside Park, hidden behind train tracks and sandwiched between GulfQuest and the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center.

“The fact is you can’t see the park until you are in it,” Hunter said. “(With Heroes Park) that is going to connect and create that gateway that says, ‘I can’t see the actual park but here is the gateway into the park that I can see, and it will have an impact.”

Amtrak returns

Amtrak’s return to Mobile will also bring passenger trains close to Heroes Park, and to the entrance of Cooper Riverside Park.

Stimpson said he has yet to have conversations with Amtrak officials or others linked to the rail line’s return to the Gulf Coast about what is needed ahead of the service’s return. It’s unclear when the service might restart, but officials have said it will take place in 2023.

“We are scheduled to talk in the near future,” Stimpson said. “That will be the first meeting with some direction.

He added, “In thinking about riverfront activation, we’ve been talking about that for the past three to five years now. It never included Amtrak. It was more about pedestrian foot traffic circulating around the Convention Center and Cooper Riverside Park and to GulfQuest. That’s why (we are) doing Heroes Park plaza as an entryway. With Amtrak, that will add a component that is not sandwiched in there yet. They will be on a short fuse to get stuff done. It could all come together in a short (period) of time.”

Dave Clark, president & CEO with Visit Mobile and a member of the Southern Rail Commission, said the train stop will bring people directly to the park.

“With Amtrak pulling up to that space, and every day, you have something special that is the placemaking hub of downtown Mobile,” he said.

Shipping containers

Clark said one idea is to add shipping containers within the park to provide dining, offering a similar feature that has been in place at the Town Center in Spanish Fort for the past several years. The Gulf in Orange Beach, which faces the Gulf of Mexico, is a restaurant and entertainment venue also built out of shipping containers.

The containers would also add a historical nod to the city’s riverfront: Malcolm McLean, recognized as the pioneer of containerized shipping that revolutionized global commerce, first tested his ideas in Mobile after he purchased the Waterman Steamship Company in the 1950s.

“We were talking about this idea before it went into Spanish Fort,” said Clark, acknowledging that his agency was in talks with a developer about a similar project at Cooper Riverside Park before the pandemic began. “If there was a place where it belongs, it is in Mobile, Alabama, where containerized shipping was founded.”

Said Clark, “They are easy to put together and no expensive for retail people to sell ice cream, coffee, T-shirts, or smoked meats. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to do that immediately.”

Water Street challenges

Getting the public to the riverfront will also be a challenge. Water Street, a four-lane road, serves a throughfare for truck traffic connecting Interstate 10 to I-165 and I-65.

“It’s a task sometime to walk across Water from Government and St. Francis streets to the waterfront area,” Mobile City Councilman William Carroll, who represents the downtown area, said. “We need to make it more walkable friendly if we really want to see this work.”

No plans are in place to structurally change the street, though discussions about making it more pedestrian friendly have existed since at least 2016. That year, the city spent $283,459 on a contract with Thompson Engineering to draft a proposal to make the street more inviting to residents and visitors.

James Gordon, a spokesman with the Alabama Department of Transportation’s Southwest Region, said any changes to Water Street are solely a city decision. He said ALDOT will make changes to reconfigure ramps leading motorists to I-10 once the $2.7 billion I-10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway project is under construction.

Stimpson said that making simple changes to lane striping is “what works” for Water Street and will be considered over more expensive projects that involve removing curb and gutter.

“I think you’ll see upgrade to the paint,” he said.

And getting people into the park will be key in keeping it an entertainment destination for years to come, Clark said.

“If (programs and events) are consistent and they are there, activity will multiply … GulfQuest will get busier, and there will be people around it,” he said. “It’s about having people there every day.”