Mobile leaders spent a few minutes looking at the past Wednesday morning as they broke ground on a new arena that they described as a cornerstone of a bright future.

Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson singled out his two predecessors, Mike Dow and Sam Jones, who had front-row seats at Wednesday’s ceremony on the edge of the old Mobile Civic Center grounds. The area is now a giant construction site.

“So as you look behind me into the skyline and you look at Government Plaza, Commissioner Jones at that point had a lot to do with fingerprints being on that as that came out of the ground and was completed,” said Stimpson of Sam Jones, now a state representative, who served on the Mobile County Commission before becoming mayor in 2005. “If you look at the skyline and you see the RSA tower, Mike Dow, we would not have the investment from RSA if it wasn’t for Mayor Dow.”

Councilman William Carroll went even further back, describing the impact that the “urban renewal” movement of the early ‘60s had on the Down the Bay area, razing residential neighborhoods to create the space for I-10 and what was then called the Mobile Municipal Auditorium, which opened in 1964.

“Let me take you now to the transformation of this site,” said Carroll. “Where we’re standing was nothing but residential houses and people living here [in] Down the Bay. When they built this first auditorium, as we called it, it changed the lives of the people Down the Bay, of all of us and all of our families that had been living down here since the 1920s. Change was hard. People were moved. People were replaced. But the vision of the original auditorium bought us hope. It bought us concerts, it bought us entertainment, it bought us vision, and it bought us so many things [that came] to this neighborhood.

Carroll said the new arena is “a legacy project” that represents “more change, a little bit more diversity, a different type of architecture, but with the ability to bring in that entertainment value again.”

He praised Dow for the optimism of his “String of Pearls” concept and Jones for taking the first steps toward building the consensus that a new civic center was needed. “The state, the city and the country was going through one of the hardest times that it ever had,” Carroll said of the national post-2008 economic slump that occurred during Jones’ administration. “But through his leadership, we were able to pass a one-cent sales tax. That one cent has helped us get here today. The hardest thing that we probably ever had to do while we’re in office, isn’t that right? But that vision got us here today.”

George Talbot, representing program manager Volkert Inc., said that coming up with the new design was somewhat challenging, in that “in Mobile, everybody wants things to be better. They just don’t want you to change anything.”

“That’s a tricky thing to try to figure out,” he said. “But I think we’re on that path with this project. And you can literally feel the winds of change blowing this morning. They’re going to blow quickly on this site. I think by August … you’ll start seeing vertical construction.”

Peter Luukko, the co-chairman of Oak View Group, which will manage the arena and other city-owned properties, said the facility will be unique because of Mobile’s unique needs, including the Civic Center’s longtime role as the city’s leading venue for Mardi Gras balls.

“If you look at the exterior of this facility, it’s Mobile,” he said. “It’s got that Mardi Gras feel to it, it sets in with the architecture downtown. … Then you get into the design itself. We’ll have the club seating, we’ll have the suites, we’ll have great food and many local purveyors here. That’s very, very important to us and to the success of this facility because we want everybody to win. We don’t come in with a cookie-cutter approach. We assimilate into the marketplace. So the design will be really, really special. But what is going to really make this building different than this arena, different than anyone that I’ve been involved in or our company, is the spaces we’re building to accommodate the Mardi Gras.”

“We’re designing spaces into this arena so we can still accommodate that,” he said. “So it’s going to be better for the Mardi Gras folks than it’s ever been during Mardi Gras, but then in all the other times, and this is so important, we’re going to have spaces that no other arena has. So we’re going to do special VIP areas. We’re going to be able to do shows in these areas and do a lot of other events that maybe arenas of this nature can’t do. So it’s going to be so unique here and so special and so different than any place else. And as I mentioned earlier, when you’re different and you have a signature and you have a city like this, this is how you book more events. It just snowballs the events.”

“So we’re going to have an incredible, incredible amount of shows from that,” said Luukko. “We’re going to have a professional hockey team and I know it’s going to be very, very successful. … We’ll have family shows, we’ll have college athletic events, we’ll have NCAA tournaments, we’ll maybe do professional preseason games for NBA, NHL, what have you. But there’s going to be a lot of events here and you know, the key to this will be we’re going to have something for everybody, everybody in this community.”

Teamwork with the city had been excellent from the beginning of the process, Luuko said. “And I think really what it told us and it probably tells other people who come into this town that Mobile’s open for business,” he said, “and that Mobile can get things done and get them done quick.”

Bradley Byrne, president and CEO of the Mobile Chamber, also praised the project as transformative.

“We’re ushering in a new era for downtown Mobile,” Byrne said. “This arena represents a cornerstone revitalization of our urban core. … For decades, we’ve envisioned a vibrant, dynamic downtown where people live, work and play.”

The arena project is expected to cost about $300 million, with $250 million of that coming from a city bond issue. The projected opening date is in early 2027.

“At the end of the construction of the arena, you know, we will have spent about $500 million on this site,” said Stimpson. (That figure includes a parking deck and the construction of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers building on the property.)

But he projected that it would be a magnet for investment. “Part of this construction is we’re going to be laying the groundwork for a future first-class hotel, a new performing arts theater,” he said. “There’ll be residential, retail as well as restaurant developments and much more. Within the next 10 years, I would predict there could be, at least, on this site, a billion dollars worth of investment. That is going to be amazing.”