Old City Hall, Mobile's Italianate Landmark

Mobile's Old City Hall is one of the most remarkable civic buildings to survive from the antebellum South. Built between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen fifty-seven in the Italianate style, the complex originally served two purposes at once: the upper floors housed municipal offices while the ground level functioned as a public market where citizens bought vegetables, meat, and fish. The timing was urgent because the previous city hall burned down in December of eighteen fifty-five while this one was still under construction.

The complex covered two-thirds of a city block near the foot of Government Street, a short distance from the port that made Mobile prosperous. In nineteen seventy-three it was declared a National Historic Landmark as a rare well-preserved example of a nineteenth-century building that combined civic government and commercial market under one roof. It now houses the History Museum of Mobile.