Artist Bruce Larsen works on one of the seahorse sculptures that will be part of the display at Fairhope's Arts Alley.

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FAIRHOPE — Metal sculptures of seahorses will be a centerpiece of the Fairhope Arts Alley project planned to draw downtown visitors into the open space near the city parking garage, project supporters said.

The Arts Alley project is intended to convert the spot into a gathering place in the area near the city parking garage in the center of the block between Fairhope Avenue, Church Street, Magnolia Avenue and Section Street.

One centerpiece of the project will be a set of sculptures by artist Bruce Larsen. Lee Turner of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation said the corporation will pay $125,000 for the pieces. Turner said the project is planned to bring people to the space and to downtown.

"One of the reasons is gentrifying the area and having public art, obviously, one of the main reasons," Turner said. "Another main reason is we've always been concerned about the lack of use of the parking garage and that maybe it's not 100 percent utilized. One of the things that we want this piece of art to do, and Bruce will get into the details of it, is to try to draw people from the road to the parking garage. One component of this piece of art will be out at the road. Another component will be up on the top of the parking garage, and we'll be trying to visually pull those two together to get people in the parking garage."

The Arts Alley project is intended to make the alley a major walking and gathering place for people during events such as the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival or strollers walking through downtown, according to previous reports. The site is a five-minute walk to the edge of downtown and 10 minutes from Mobile Bay.

Larsen said art will include sculptures of seahorses. Seahorses are a part of the Mobile Bay environment and will be a good theme for the project.

"We finally settled on the seahorse. I think it's a very elegant shape. It does have some history here, the dwarf seahorse," Larsen said. "You still find them all over down Dauphin Island and that area, but you don't find them so much now up this far."

The sculptures, like much of Larsen's work, will be made from scrap metal. He said much of the metal planned for the project also has a connection to the area.

"I've already started on the big seahorse and I'm having a lot of fun with it," Larsen said. There's a lot of local metal in it. There're pieces from predominantly farmers, pieces from Baldwin County that are mainly Fairhope."

"It has pieces from the Saenger Theater. It has pieces from farmers around me. It has World War II wrenches from Mobile, from the war effort. There're pieces from the Theater 98 seats and earlier those seats were from the first movie theater in Mobile, so there's this progression that's handed down," he added later.

One seahorse will be mounted on top of the parking garage to create a silhouette against the sky and bay.

"This is against the sky," he said. "This would be against the sunrise, so the sky actually becomes part of the photograph and I'm hoping that people will start photographing this in dramatic sunrises and then people will go look for it when they come to Fairhope."

The seahorses will be set against a background of sculpted metal seaweed. Pieces of the work will extend out over Church Street to draw visitors into the alley, Turner said.

The alley space is also planned as a downtown transit hub for the Baldwin Rural Area Transportation System. City officials are going out for bids on that project after several previous attempts.

In 2021, a bid of $1.44 million was rejected after it exceeded engineering estimates by about $150,000, according to reports. Another request for bids in 2022 was rejected due to problems with federal guidelines on submission advertisements.

The county transit system now has a hub east of downtown on Fairhope Avenue near the Satellite Courthouse.