The Architecture of Five Empires: Creole Cottages and Greek Revival

The neighborhoods west and north of downtown Mobile contain one of the most layered architectural landscapes in the American South, and most people drive through it without knowing what they are looking at.

The oldest surviving house type is the Creole cottage, a form that emerged along the central Gulf Coast between roughly seventeen ninety and eighteen forty. It is a one-and-a-half-story building, four rooms, gabled roof, no central hallway, with a full front porch designed to circulate air in the heat. The style blended French and Spanish construction methods with the demands of the subtropical climate. The Bishop Portier House, built in eighteen thirty-four, is one of the finest surviving examples in the city.

As Mobile grew wealthy on cotton in the eighteen thirties and forties, the cotton-merchant class built in the Greek Revival mode: symmetrical facades, columns, heavy cornices, the architecture of republican confidence and plantation money. The Old Dauphin Way Historic District, which stretches westward from downtown, contains roughly three thousand contributing historic structures from the Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, and Craftsman periods, layered across a century and a half of building campaigns.

What makes this neighborhood unusual is its density of intact wood-frame houses from the eighteen-eighties through the nineteen-twenties, craftsman bungalows and Victorian cottages built for laborers and tradespeople, not just merchants. Five empires governed this city, and each left a building type. Walking Old Dauphin Way is a compressed reading of all of them.