We can buy bananas whenever we want now but for much of the 19th century, the fruit was a rare and luxurious treat. Thankfully for Alabama fruit-lovers, the first banana shipment pulled into Mobile Bay in 1893, according to a 2023 article by Amelia Rose Zimlich for Mobile Bay Magazine.
See more vintage photos of the Banana Docks in the gallery at the top of this story.
In fact, bananas became so popular in America that Teddy Roosevelt declared discarded peels a hazard on New York sidewalks and created an ordinance prohibiting them. As president of the New York Police Department at the time, Roosevelt told his police captains that the banana skin had a “tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific forces on hard pavement.” A Feb. 9, 1896, article in the New York Times declared in its headline: “War on the Banana Skin.”
Read more stories about Vintage Alabama here.…