AFTER CHARLESTON, Savannah, Georgia, two hours to the south, seems busy, noisy and touristy. Parking and restaurant reservations are hard to come by, probably because we’re here on a weekend.
But Savannah’s historic district, which forms the heart of the city and is centered on 22 lush public squares, of an original 24 first laid out in the 18th century, is a stunner.
Many of the houses are from the mid-19th century and reminiscent of Brooklyn’s flat-fronted, three-windows-across row houses, though with shutters and sometimes wrought iron balconies. Free-standing mansions abound, in a variety of styles, and everything is fringed with palms and other greenery.
The early part of our visit was a washout. It was pouring rain and we couldn’t find a guided walking tour (only trolley and horse-drawn carriage tours, which I rejected as embarrassing). Instead, we picked up a book and did a self-guided one, taking in classic sites that included Forrest Gump’s bench in Forsyth Park and the terracotta-colored house featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, above, as well as the only Gothic style synagogue in the U.S., below, built in the 1840s and still going strong.
We happened on one of the few historic houses open to the public, the c.1841 Old Sorrel-Weed House, below. It had been used as a boarding house and had some tacky retail shops on the ground floor from the 1940s through 1990s. Then it was bought by a private individual who spent a few million trying to bring it back to how it looked when it was a social hotspot for such guests as Robert E. Lee.
The owner ran out of funds before completing the restoration (modern plastic chandeliers are still in place), and gifted the house, still far from finished, to a foundation. They call it Greek Revival-Regency style, which is new to me, but I love the deep colors of the rooms (similar to the originals, discovered under 30 layers of paint) and the moldings, doors and other details that survived because of what our guide called “inadvertent conservation.” The ceilings had been dropped, fireplaces boxed in, etc., during the house’s years of debasement, so the original details remained mostly intact.
We are lodged at the River Street Inn, below, a former cotton warehouse and one of several surviving early 19th century brick industrial buildings, constructed of ballast stones and built on a bluff, that have been converted to riverside hotels.
The Savannah River is right outside our window. Barges loaded with containers pass by with regularity, and the sounds of foghorns and music from the clubs below waft in at night.
Best meal so far: a genteel Southern-style lunch at the c.1789 Olde Pink House, below, where I had my first-ever Hoppin’ John (rice with vegs and black-eyed peas).
Enjoyed an afternoon latte at the Gryphon, below, a tea room operated by the Savannah College of Art and Design in a turn-of-the-century apothecary shop.
As I write this, the blare of a trumpet from a busker on the riverfront walk is penetrating the closed windows and balcony door of our river-view digs. Louis Armstrong he’s not. But the sunset over the Savannah River is making up for it.
casaCARA 