ancient cities

690 Savannah, Georgia
Savannah, the relatively small 60-by-90-foot residential
lot backing onto a rear laneway encouraged
builders to fill the front half of the site for the
principal house and situate a smaller carriage
house at the rear fronting the lane. The presence of
rear lanes eliminated the need for private side
driveways. Savannah houses front the civic streets
and, by the 1820s, sought greater grandeur by raising
the main living space a full story above the
street accessed by a prominent staircase and porch.
The rhythmic pattern of exterior residential staircases
became a defining architectural feature of
downtown Savannah.
The relatively small block size defined in the
Oglethorpe plan, however, limited the scale of
architectural development. By the twentieth century,
large developments were accommodated by
consolidating a pair of trust lots and the street
between into a single building site, such as the
1930s expansion of the 1895 U.S. Post Office at
Wright Square.
Urban Beautification in the Early 1800s
By the late eighteenth century, Savannah’s city
council began taking action to improve the health
and beauty of the growing town. The council
passed ordinances regulating the planting, care,
and protection of trees along the city’s streets to
provide shade and absorb the “noxious vapor”
from nearby marshes. Quite remarkable for the
time, visual concerns prompted regulations that
calibrated the distance a tree should be planted
from the lot line with the width of a street.
The continued expansion of the city into the
commons during the early 1800s presented an
opportunity to enhance the civic grandeur inherent
in Oglethorpe’s plan. Upon laying out a third row
of wards, the city created a new east–west avenue,
at double the width of earlier major streets and
divided by a grassy tree-lined boulevard. Almost
immediately, public institutions and private citizens
alike recognized the potential prestige of
fronting this grand avenue, which functioned
much like a linear square. The creation of South
Broad Street demonstrated the flexibility in the
Savannah plan to accommodate changing scales
and hierarchies. In the 1830s, the city added a second
broad avenue with a boulevard (Liberty
Street).
By the early nineteenth century, the principally
utilitarian role of the squares gave way to a greater
emphasis on civic beauty, as the erection of monuments
and fountains signaled the new stature of
the city’s green spaces. Beginning in 1825 with the
monument to General Nathaneal Greene, a
50-foot-tall obelisk designed by noted Philadelphia
architect William Strickland, a series of monuments
was erected in the squares along Bull
Street over the next 80 years. The other monuments
commemorated Count Casmir Pulaski,
William Washington Gordon, Sergeant Jasper, and
General James Oglethorpe.
The arrival of the railroad along West Broad
Street rapidly changed the social complexion of the
city’s west side from a desirable address for the
city’s elite to an increasingly industrial character.
Founded in 1833, the Central of Georgia Railway
rapidly grew into one of the country’s largest railroad
companies, with tracks extending throughout
the southeast. The company’s extensive complex of
industrial and administrative buildings (remaining
today as one of the best preserved nineteenth-
century railroad complexes in the country) transformed
West Broad Street into the principal conduit
of freight to the city’s bustling port. A second railroad
complex, the Savannah, Florida and Western
Railroad, fronted East Broad Street. The two complexes
encouraged the development of affordable
one-story worker cottages along the east and west
edges of the city, whose clapboard construction
and placement at grade differed notably from the
raised brick residences that defined the more central
area of the city.
One of the most remarkable and unusual urban
features of Savannah is its complex of riverfront
warehouses connected to the city by terraced lanes
and numerous iron bridges. Unlike the predominantly
flat and low-lying surrounding landscape,
Savannah’s riverfront facilities straddled a steep
35-foot bluff. Warehouses erected at the base of
the bluff rose five stories above the river but only
two stories above the top of the bluff facing the
city. A series of cobbled ramps and stone retaining
walls installed in the 1850s using ballast stones from
incoming ships solidified the bluff into a distinctive
set of terraced lanes, spanned by iron bridges to provide
at-grade access to the upper commercial stories
of the warehouses—collectively called Factors Walk.
This unique urban landscape stands as one of the