SAVANNAH, GA | SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2010 – After the maudlin cant of our last few posts, it was a giant relief to arrive in Savannah. The city is amazing. Serene and hip. A strange, comforting combination. The way that the Southern element, the grace and ease and tranquility, has segued into a totally unexpected version of current.
Who knows what people do for work here. It was also a Saturday, so maybe most of them were off, it was the weekend, slightly overcast in the morning, with sun breaking through by afternoon. But the air here, the streets, all the tree-canopied squares, the patina of the buildings, the worn valleys in the stone steps down to the river. Anyway, it was a balm. We were healed by it. We knew immediately as we walked along the streets.
Who knows what people do for work here. It was also a Saturday, so maybe most of them were off, it was the weekend, slightly overcast in the morning, with sun breaking through by afternoon. But the air here, the streets, all the tree-canopied squares, the patina of the buildings, the worn valleys in the stone steps down to the river. Anyway, it was a balm. We were healed by it. We knew immediately as we walked along the streets.
The students of SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), which has buildings throughout the city, lounged in the sun and shade at sidewalk cafes or floated through the squares on hipster bikes. There were people visiting from all over. I heard the Spanish of Mexico City, some other tongues I couldn’t place. Several weddings going on in the squares. A bunch of white kids at a bar drinking sodas, all excited, their faces and bodies covered in powdery paint at a bar. They had just played out an old Indian holiday game and were amazed by themselves.
The squares are what give the city itself. There are 24 of them, each the quiet fulcrum of a small neighborhood. The squares are big enough to support a small forest of live oaks, the trees with the undulating, massively cantilevered limbs that shade everything. They reach easily from the squares across the streets to the far sidewalks. Then there are the azaleas, shrubs, statuary, etc. The integration of landscape and city is so unlike anywhere else. Cars can get where they are going no problem. But people walking also can, and are primary. You can always cross the street, easily, practically without thinking.
Maybe it’s the scale. Maybe Savannah is small enough so that somehow these squares, designed in the 1740s and through to the 1850s, can work. Maybe you couldn’t translate this balance of the natural and the urban in a larger city. But Savannah is amazing. It is up there with the more storied, larger cities of this country. If New York is the city of all American cities, because of its shear size and wealth and age, and if San Francisco is the most beautiful, and Seattle, notable for its unimpeachably dark weird, then Savannah is the serene hip.
There should be more Savannahs, more iterations permutations of this place. There is no place like it.
leaving Surf City, for Savannah as it turned out
a rare pass for Yellow Truck, about to blow by a moped
old guy on the way to Walterboro, closing in on biodiesel
in Ladson, SC after risking all to find a drink of biodiesel. would never know they had it if wasn't noted online.
SAVANNAH! headless binoculing. This one's for you Norell
Some Savannah hotties. nice kickstand on the aqua one. no pic, but there are also plenty of fixies intown
the canopy of live oaks in one of the squares
Yellow Truck in Orleans Square
lightpost
porch
coming down the stairs of author Flannery O'Connor's childhood home
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