Mobile seeks contractor to build park dedicated to baseball Hall of Famers

Hank Aaron and Billy Williams grew up playing for Ed Tucker’s Mobile Black Bears.

Satchel Paige first played baseball in Mobile, during the 1920s. Willie McCovey played ball on a Mobile playground, learning how to pitch and play first base. Ozzie Smith was born in the Port City.

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No city the size of Mobile can even come close to claiming five homegrown Major League Baseball Hall of Famers. And to celebrate the city’s lineage with America’s Pastime, all five will be honored with statues dedicated to them at Hero Plaza in downtown Mobile.

But a looming question remains on the fate of the plaza: Who is going to build it?

The Mobile City Council will consider on Tuesday at $148,914 contract with Volkert Inc. to continue with project management duties and engineering while the city seeks out a bidder who can construct it.

Jason Johnson, a spokesman for Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson, said last week that the city is waiting on a second round of bids after the initial one produced only one interested bidder. That bidder, Johnson said, came back with a price that “a bit over” of what the city was seeking.

“It’s in a bit of a lull until that bid comes back,” said Johnson, referring to the plaza’s construction at the western edge of the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center along Water Street. “We’re getting there. As soon as (the bidding gets completed) the work will start as quickly as it can.”

Statues under construction

A maquette of a Hank Aaron statue that will be showcased within the Hall of Fame Courtyard in Mobile, Ala., was unveiled during a ceremony on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, at the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center. (John Sharp/[email protected]).

Work is already happening on 9-foot-tall statues of all five baseball Hall of Famers. In addition to the MLB Hall of Famers, a statue of Mobile’s only National Football League Hall of Famer – Robert Brazile Jr. – will also be part of the plaza once it opens sometime next year.

Mobile has a unique history with professional baseball, and one that no other city its size can share. Only New York City and Los Angeles can claim more native residents enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

The five Hall of Famers from Mobile include:

Hank Aaron Park — The names of Mobile’s famous baseball players, including Hall of Famers like Satchel Paige, surround a Hank Aaron monument at a city park that dates back to 1947. Henry “Hank” Aaron Park, formerly Carver Park, is located within the Toulminville neighborhood of Mobile, Ala., and is about two blocks from where Aaron’s childhood home once stood on Edwards Avenue. The park was renamed after the iconic Major League Baseball player in 1991. The etched stones and the Aaron monument were unveiled in 1999. (John Sharp/[email protected]).

Aaron, who played primarily for the Braves organization from 1954-1976, and who was enshrined into the MLB Hall of Fame in 1982.
McCovey, who played primarily for the Giants from 1959-1980, and who was inducted in 1989.
Paige, who played in the Negro Leagues and in MLB from 1927-1965, and who was inducted in 1971.
Williams, who played primarily for the Cubs from 1965-1976, and who was inducted in 1987.
Smith, who played primarily for the Cardinals from 1978-1996, and who was inducted in 2002.

Brett Grill, the sculptor hired to make the structures, is working on the statues at his studio in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was hired in March 2022. The project’s price-tag is “not to exceed” $1.18 million.

“We’ve worked with the architects for almost a year now and we have plans for the park that everyone is really pleased with and that will really honor these athletes in a way they deserve to be honored,” Grill told AL.com last week.

He said the park will be designed to expand, which means additional statues or other features could be installed.

“There are certainly other athletes from Mobile who are in different sports, hall of fames, who have yet to be unearthed,” Grill said.

Shifting timeline

Grill said the timeline for his project has shifted. He said the original goal was to have the statues installed and the plaza completed by the end of this year, with an opening in the spring of 2024. He said the new timeline calls for the plaza to open sometime next year.

The plaza’s concept was unveiled in March 2022, with Aaron’s widow, Billye, in attendance.

“The sculptures are going to be done in the first quarter of next year and will be sitting around and waiting for the (plaza) to be constructed for them,” he said.

Grill said there are talks about bringing at least one of the statues to Mobile early for some sort of showcase or preview “to just continue to keep the park on the radar of the public.”

The plaza is part of an appropriation OK’d by the Mobile City Council last year to develop the park. The money comes from the city’s tax-increment financing (TIF) funds that are dedicated to redeveloping downtown Mobile. TIF funds in Alabama are utilized by local governments to promote economic development within a geographically defined area. As development occurs within a TIF – and as property values increase – the revenues generated from the extra property taxes are collected and set aside in the city’s TIF fund to pay for other public infrastructure improvements.

The city, as of last year, said approximately $12 million remains in the city’s TIF fund.

The project is also backed with some private financing. A $150,000 donation was committed last year by Canadian-based Canfor Southern Pine, which has its U.S. headquarters in Mobile.