“It’s hailed as the first skyscraper on the Gulf Coast and one of the first in the Southeast, an 11-story reinforced concrete, terracotta-clad marvel that rose in downtown Mobile at Dauphin and Royal streets starting in 1906.
Finished two years later, the slender, elegant Van Antwerp Building long stood as a focal point of Mobile, greeting downtown denizens through the expansive drug store of the same name. Crystal chandeliers glittered from a 20-foot ceiling. Customers sitting along the 53-foot white marble soda fountain admired their reflections in mahogany-framed mirrors. There was even a rare-for-the-time ladies’ powder room on the second floor. Above were physician and dentist offices before doctors found it practical to work closer to hospitals on Spring Hill Avenue.
When malls arrived in the 1960s, the Van Antwerp was abandoned, for the most part, and began a time as a lady in waiting — too impressive for the wrecking ball but no easy task for renovators. In an age requiring accessible design she had but one tiny stairwell, two ancient Otis elevators and a fire escape that led out a window. The building’s electrical service was housed in a room the size of a bedroom closet. And its cast-in-place crown, an impressive concrete cornice that evoked big-city classical authority, was removed years earlier in response to a demand from the city after a similar architectural feature crashed to the street in Birmingham, killing a passerby.”
Read the rest of the article at Business Alabama.