Savannah: The Town
Savannah's Historic District is flanked by the river, Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in the west and, to the east, Broad Street, the old commercial main street and offices. Broughton Street has since become the main thoroughfare of downtown Savannah. You can get an overview at the Savannah History Museum , behind the visitor center, in the restored Railroad Station at 303 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (daily 9am-5pm; $3), where an informative jaunt through Native American culture, colonial development, the river and the Civil War is let down slightly by a slide show that is less a history lesson than a hard-sell promotion of Savannah's considerable charms. A block south, the Historic Railroad Shops (daily 9am-4pm) is a worthwhile slice of industrial architecture.The best way to get a feel for the place is simply to wander the "tabby" streets - made from a kind of primitive concrete mashed up with oyster shells - lined with shuttered Federal, Regency and antebellum houses adorned with intricate iron balconies, and intriguing details such as false "earthquake decorations." These sturdy iron rods embedded in the walls served no purpose, but were placed there simply to keep up with elegant South Carolina neighbor Charleston in architectural cachet. Note, too, the preponderance of light blue houses, washed in buttermilk and indigo to keep the ghosts away. The shady residential squares , ablaze with dogwood trees, azaleas and magnolias, offer peaceful respite from the blistering summer heat. Forrest Gump told his life story from a bench in Chippewa Square , but eager movie-buffs will find an imposing statue of James Oglethorpe, and no such bench.
Most visitors take in one or two of Savannah's old mansions , such as the English architect William Jay's neoclassical Regency style Owen-Thomas House , 124 Abercorn St (tours Mon noon-5pm, Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; $8; tel 912/233-9743), or the redbrick Georgian Davenport House , 324 E State St (Mon-Fri 10am-4.30pm, Sat 1pm-4.30pm; $4; tel 912/236-8097). The latter, the first restoration project of the Historic Savannah Foundation, is sparsely furnished but boasts a wonderful elliptical staircase and delicate plasterwork. The Green-Meldrim House , on Madison Square (Tues & Thurs-Sat 10am-4pm; $5; tel 912/232-1251), is a splendid Gothic Revival mansion with dramatic ironwork, which General Sherman used as his headquarters. At the southern edge of the Historic District, the Massie Heritage Interpretation Center , 207 E Gordon St (Mon-Fri 9am-4pm; $3), is a simple, effective museum illuminating Savannah's architecture with displays on its neighborhoods and growth, and tracing influences from as far away as London and Beijing. While you can't go inside, the Mercer House on picturesque Monterey Square nearby is one of the grandest of the city's mansions and featured prominently in "The Book." Also worth a visit is another of Jay's Regency mansions, the Telfair Museum of Art , 124 Abercorn St (Mon noon-5pm, Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $8, Sundays free; tel 912/232-1177), which also has the distinction of being the oldest art museum in the South.
Though the Spanish moss of the city proper may be redolent of the Old South, Savannah's waterfront area, at the foot of a steep little bluff below Bay Street and reached by assorted stone staircases and atmospheric alleyways, retains the look and feel of an eighteenth-century European port. The main thoroughfare, River Street , is cobbled with the ballast carried by long-vanished sailing ships, while its tall brick cotton warehouses are said to be haunted by the ghosts of the slave stevedores. It's now a lively commercial district, lined with seafood restaurants and salty bars that heave with partying crowds on Saturday nights; as certain businesses target themselves ever more directly toward the "Spring Break" student crowd, however, some of its former charm is being lost. Looking out over the water from the paved Riverfront Plaza across the way you can appreciate just how busy the port still is.
As the one-time point of entry for many of Georgia's slaves, Savannah has a strong black history . The predominantly black Victorian District , southeast of downtown, is being slowly restored, and has a couple of good, if underfunded, museums. The nerve center of the restoration process is the King-Tisdell Cottage , 514 E Huntingdon St, owned by a middle-class black family c.1900 (Tues-Fri noon-4.30pm, Sat 1-4pm; $3; tel 912/234-8000). In addition to a fine collection of gullah baskets and African woodcarving, it illustrates the history of slaves and free blacks before the Civil War, and of the freed slaves after, commemorating Savannah's role as the site of Sherman's famous " Field Order #15 ," which granted each freed slave forty acres and a mule. The museum also operates excellent black heritage tours (leaving from the visi-tor center, Mon-Sat 1pm & 3pm; $15; call a day in advance at 912/234-8000). The two-hour tours take in the Second African Baptist Church , 123 Houston St, where Field Order #15 was signed; the poor black Yamacraw neighborhood, now sadly run-down and depressed; and the 1777 First African Baptist Church , the oldest black church in North America, built by slaves. This last, at 23 Montgomery St in the Historic District, can also be visited independently (daily 10am-2pm). Note the decorative carvings by the pews and diamond-shaped holes in the floor, ventilation for slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Back in the Victorian District, the airy Beach Institute , 502 E Harris St (Tues-Sat noon-5pm; $3.50), Georgia's first school for freed slaves, today houses an African-American art gallery with a permanent display of extraordinary woodcarvings by folk artist Ulysses Davis.
A ten-minute drive east from Savannah will take you to the lovely Bonaventure Cemetery (dusk to dawn), swathed in trees and sloping down to the Wilmington River. The final resting place of luminaries such as Johnny Mercer and Conrad Aiken, it's also a major sight in "The Book" and written about there to great effect. Sylvia Shaw Judson's Bird Girl statue, which graces the cover and used to be situated here, has since been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art.
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