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...about cultural divides in this area. You can pretty much supplant "West Mobile" in this piece with "Eastern Shore." Except the folks in Fairhope won't allow apartments over there. They don't want the hoi polloi about, you know.
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Topographically, Mobile is pretty blasé. A flood plain and some ridges to the west are about the extent of it. But, that’s only if you go by the USGS survey. The contours of its inner landscape are much more dramatic.
Unseen to the uninitiated are two chasms that dominate our civic terrain. And without better attempts to bridge either of the crevasses, this community is ill-fated.
The first of these canyons is plainly self-evident, physically represented by the concrete axis of Interstate Sixty-Five bifurcating our street maps. The well-trod West Mobile/Old Mobile saga yet exists.
Between the two, visual differences alone are stark. Midtown is Spanish moss and ironwork, Creole cottages and Georgian manors, narrow concrete streets and undulating sidewalks beneath the live oaks. Small shops and entrepreneurial ventures are commonplace, sprouting up in quaint little buildings that may predate the owners’ grandparents. When coastal fog creeps through the wee hour streets, it’s a place unlike most any else on Earth.
West Mobile is asphalt, and neon, and plastic, and strip malls, and traffic under a despotic Southern sun, and oil burning-burning-burning, and Wal-Mart, and billboards, and pine trees, and traffic, and chain restaurants, and traffic, and shimmering heat dancing from your hood, and all the obnoxiousness our ultra-petro, mega-techno, limited-warranty civilization can muster. But that’s just Airport Boulevard.
We can’t forget the subdivisions filled with cookie cutter homes where every window pane on the block is made from aluminum. To stand at any corner in West Mobile and look around is to be in Anywhere U.S.A.. There is nothing unique, nothing that specifically nails down a place and character. It’s the same amorphous continuum that stretches from sea to shining sea.
Look for an apartment in the Garden District and you’ll find a garage unit, a duplex or subdivided historic house. In West Mobile, you’ll be assigned a cubicle in a complex that houses five hundred.
Old Mobile is all that was before the mushroom cloud.
West Mobile is the fallout.
Old Mobile lies roughly within the high-speed loop formed by Interstates Sixty-Five and Ten, and the One Sixty-Five connector. The nearly three-quarters of town beyond that track are the echo of the local post-War boom of the last century. This surge in population answered available jobs at the new Brookley Air Base. The influx was mostly from the hinterlands, its people a sort typified as provincial by many longtime natives. They helped push the emergence of West Mobile.
However, the most integral fuel of West Mobile growth was the same force building suburbs across the nation. It drove us into a ranch-style refuge to huddle in Nuclear Age oblivion before our cathode fireplaces. It was, and is, White Flight.
That, too, is a result of Mobile’s other big spiritual chasm, our other chief obstacle to true growth.
It’s America’s biggest canard and conundrum: Race.
Though Mobile escaped the conflicts that pockmarked the Civil Rights era South, there exists a sublime racial tension in this town. Look at Mardi Gras. Look at our churches and nightclubs. Everywhere, we divide our potential; we fail to maximize our chances to improve the world around us.
And our tendency to paint dark faces with the colors of fear and suspicion affects everything. It fosters the unease many West Mobilians feel about venturing east of I-65. I’ve heard it over and over and over again.
And it’s a lie.
Look, what is everyone so worried about? The usual suspects—“violent crime” and the ever-attendant “drugs”? Well, statistics, cold numerical facts, bear witness that Downtown Mobile is actually one of the safest places to be in regard to violent crime. And the drug question is laughable in light of the meth labs sprouting like fungi across the rest of the county.
It’s all perception.
One of my favorite interchanges concerning this subject was with a man who fled Mobile for the Eastern Shore a few years back. “Downtown revitalization is never gonna’ work,” his twang rang with confidence.
“Why?” I asked. “I’m just curious as to what you’re basing this on.”
“Because it’s too damn dangerous down there,” he continued. On weekends, he would perform at Drayton Place, long before the eatery relocated westward in unstated acquiescence to paranoia and bigotry. He said that during breaks, he and a bandmate would often stroll down Dauphin Street to see what else was happening. He specifically cited the “bugaboos” and others they encountered in the Bienville Square vicinity as a volatile element.
“What, so something happened to y’all? You got mugged?” I asked.
“Well, no, but its still dangerous.”
“And you’re sure it was like that all the time,” I asked still, “not just one night or so?”
“Yeah, we must’ve walked down there twenty or twenty-five times and we saw some real shady characters.”
“But you never got mugged?” I asked again.
“No, but it just don’t look good,” he emphasized.
I silently smiled. So blind was this guy to his own preconceptions, he couldn’t see what he illustrated. He strolled through a self-described “dangerous” situation many times, the equivalent of once a week for almost six months, and not once did anything happen to him. But, he only saw what he wanted to see, only found what he convinced himself he would find.
He walked to the edge of the deepest gorge in town. He didn’t soak in the sights; didn’t wonder what treasures could be found on the other side. He just surrendered to fear and ran the other way.
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