Fugliest Landmarks in the Historic District (that somebody built that way on purpose)

Savannah is an architectural time capsule and treasure trove from end to end. From 1733 to nearly present day, the city generally grew in concentric rings radiating outward from its original core. Thus, a person moves through different periods in history as they move in a straight line away from the Landmark Historic District, the change being visible in the nature of the housing and other structures. We have a variety of historic neighborhoods (East and West Victorian District, Thomas Square, Ardsley Park, Baldwin Park, Cuyler-Brownville, Kensington Park, etc.), each of them having been built within a certain time frame or built to serve a particular demographic or dominated by the popular architectural movement of the day. The Landmark Historic District, however, used to simply be the entire city and, being the oldest part of town, it’s where people have been living the longest. As a result, this part of Savannah is home to the most heterogeneous jumble of styles and vintages because it was subject to the most building and rebuilding. This often creates a lot of charming visual interest and stimulating contrasts.

But this blog post is not about those buildings. Today, I will take you on a tour of the ugly, the uglier, and the fugly. In case you’re unclear, “fugly” is a combination of “ugly” and a forceful word that begins with F. It’s reserved for things that truly set a new standard in bad taste- the Simone Biles of unfortunate design choices, if you will.

A quick honorable mention: the one and only time I have been glad to see a historic structure replaced with a parking lot. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you what used to be the sole Brutalist building in the Historic District, followed by the tidy little parking lot that superseded it.

This used to be offices for the old Candler Hospital, I think

Another view of the same building

The current parking lot

What is Brutalism, you may ask? Second to the bullet bra, it’s the worst act of design misfeasance to develop in the post WWII era. The name perfectly conveys its aesthetic to English speaking people by pure coincidence. Brutalism is, indeed, a violent assault against anyone who treasures beauty in their environment or wishes to take joy in it. That is not how the style gets its name, however.

“Brutalism” derives from the French en brut, meaning a thing made of concrete. Concrete construction is an especial obsession of the Brutalist movement. This building style was developed by a Swiss-French architect who styled himself Le Corbusier, though that was not his name at all. Elvis, Cher, and Madonna hadn’t cornered the market yet on single-name celebrity status, so there was room for an especially cocksure and self-obsessed architect to try it on for himself. Anyway, I don’t know what Le Corbusier’s problem was, (an allergy to happiness, I think), but someone gave him an architecture degree instead of therapy and the entire world had to suffer for decades as a result.

Structures just like the one pictured above (and frequently worse) spread like a fungal infection across Europe and America after the war. Just start Googling if you want to see more and really get a sense of what Brutalism is. But it’s always some blocky monstrosity built out of concrete, so it’s also usually grey and mildewed and just generally ugly. And now communities everywhere are stuck figuring out what to do with the damn things because they are old enough to have antique status, plus a lot of significant public buildings were constructed in this style and replacing them is expensive. I know people who stan mid-century modern and even people who love Brutalism, but, I’m sorry, I will NEVER come around on that one. Throw it all straight in the trashcan, please. No regrets.

Thanks goodness Savannah only made this one small Brutalist mistake and no one came forward to fight for keeping it. Good riddance.

Now we’ll move on to surviving structures that deserve assassination. Savannah’s historic preservation movement began in 1955, but we didn’t have a historic review board until 1973. So, a lot of the most egregious intrusions on the Historic District’s landscape occurred during those years of limbo. That’s not always the case, though. Chatham County constructed its present courthouse between 1976 and 1978.

The J. Tom Coleman Courthouse

I think I would dig this as a set in the background of a movie. It makes for cool scenery, but as a real building in a city where I really live? No, thank you. The courthouse looms over Montgomery Street, with a parking garage crouching to its north (in the right of this photo) and until recently the jail crouching to its south. There is another parking garage across the street. These implacable beige boxes are the exact reason why we’ll never be able to restore Liberty Square.

Next up is the corner of Abercorn and Broughton Streets. Broughton used to be Savannah’s version of Main Street, USA, pretty much. Just on this one corner we used to have the Avon Theater, the Woolworth’s, the Weis Theater, the Lucas Theater, and the Odeon Theater, pictured below:

The Odeon Theater in an old photo of Broughton Street

Well, in 1960 some numpty decided to tear that down and replace it with an office building:

At the corner of Broughton and Abercorn

I do not consider this an upgrade. If you’re down for mid-century modern, I’m sure this is a good version of that. It’s not completely thoughtless. The tile work adds some visual interest (looks a little bit like a middle school bathroom, though). That commodious awning is great for pedestrians to hide under when it rains. The boxy protuberances on each side originally served a purpose: they held vertical louvers that could be tilted to the east or to the west in order to control light and airflow into the building. That’s clever.

But in its present form, this old place is the artistic equivalent of ash hanging off the end of a cigarette. It might be salvageable with thoughtful renovations, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. The City of Savannah had municipal offices here for years and years (it’s where people went to pay their water bill), but they sold it to someone who planned to turn it into a boutique hotel. We need another one of those like we need more panhandlers. Was affordable housing too much to ask? Apparently.

Anyway, the pandemic began not long after the sale and no visible progress has been made, aside from emptying the place out and making it look even more like urban blight than it did before. My favorite thing about this building was that you used to be able to see down the stairs that led into the basement. Hanging on the wall of the stairwell was an old yellow and black sign that said “Fallout Shelter”. It was cool as balls. I have a picture of it on my Instagram. The new owners took that sign away. If I were the one planning the hotel, I would have kept it and put a bar in the basement called “The Fallout Shelter” and all the cocktails and decor would have had a Cold War theme. Will the property’s present-day owner come up with anything that cool? Probably not.

The Odeon Theater is not the only landmark on Broughton Street to be laid waste by mid-to-late 20th century dumbassery. Behold the Liberty Bank and Trust:

Liberty Bank and Trust building, a turn-of-the-century skyscraper

The person who took this picture was standing just to the southeast of the skyscraper, angled a little to the north. That’s Bull along the right side of the building and Broughton across the front of it. Johnson Square is in the background to the right. Those are two beautiful neoclassical skyscrapers backing up to each other. I think one or both of them were designed by Hyman Whitcover, the same architect who built our City Hall. Here’s what stands on those lots now:

>:-(

NOT. AN. IMPROVEMENT.

The shorter building on the left is where the Liberty Bank building used to be and the taller building on the right is where the other skyscraper used to be. This is bullcrap. You may have changed your name to Truist, SunTrust, but I won’t forget what you did. You can go straight to Hell and take these stupid brown boxes with you.

I think these insipid bank facilities were done sometime in the 70s. Savannah lost so many of its skyscrapers post-WWII and they all got replaced with uglier things or with parking lots or garages. It’s sad. This place had quite the energetic big-city look and feel in the first half of the 20th century, especially along Broughton Street.

I’m going to leave Broughton behind and take us over to Habersham Street. Whitefield Square, as a matter of fact. It’s such a pretty neighborhood- residential, with a gazebo in the middle of the square. There are post-Civil War Queen Anne style houses with their gracious porches, colorful plants flowering in their pots. And then there’s Rose of Sharon Apartments.

OMG, why?

Rose of Sharon was built in 1972 and is senior housing. My mother-in-law used to live there. I can tell you, this place looks even worse on the inside than it does on the outside. (Also the staff are dumb and quite bad at running a facility for old people.) I would ask what sick design firm commits elder abuse like this, but I recently checked and this was built by a firm based in St. Petersburg, Florida, so that makes sense. Nothing good comes out of Florida.

This 12-story monstrosity is a bumptious intrusion on an otherwise picturesque ward. And what is up with those balconies that aren’t actually balconies? What a tease. Why would anyone suggest balconies on a tall building, but not make them usable? They’re rough concrete too, which you know I hate. What’s with the concrete? Please stop! Oh yeah, and there are only two elevators and one of them is always broken and they’re slower than spit on a good day anyhow, so what I’m saying is that everyone in this building is for sure going to die if it ever catches fire. That is the one and only reason I don’t want it to burn to the ground.

Let’s go look at something pretty for a minute. Here is a photo of the Cathedral Basilica St. John the Baptist. Now that is a proper cathedral. Good job, E. Francis Baldwin. The cathedral was completed originally in 1876, burnt down in 1898, then rebuilt to the same design in 1900.

HOWEVER

The Catholic church had to go and crap out the most uninspired social hall right across Harris Street.

Cathedral Basilica St. John the Baptist

The social hall (or whatever) right across Harris Street

Dear God, it’s me Bonnie. Why are there window units?

This does not belong here. Somebody please make it go away.

I think this one was built in the 70s too. Good lord, what happened to all the architects in the 1970s? How could anyone construct such a disappointing accessory building right in the shadow of an actual cathedral and not die of shame? What was the Church thinking? It’s not like they didn’t have the money to build something nice. It’s not as if they don’t have the money now to retrofit that sad little structure with central AC (the window units are killing me). The lots facing LaFayette Square are almost without flaw. This little shack is the worst misfire in the ward. When do you plan to atone for that, Catholic Church?

Quick pro-tip: if you ever attend a performance at the Cathedral (like an organ recital or if the Philharmonic is playing there or something), this outbuilding contains the bathrooms you have to go to during intermission. Therefore, it is most advantageous to take a seat near the back of the sanctuary so you can be first out the door and across the street. You’re welcome.

If the social hall up there seems a little sheepish about trashing up the place, one Historic District building that always strikes me as quite pleased with itself is Drayton Tower.

I do not love Drayton Tower, yet I cannot quite bring myself to hate it. It was built in 1951 and is very, very much of it’s time. It’s got a forward-facing optimistic-about-the-future energy. You can tell WWII is behind it, everyone is reveling in that post-war boom, the future is all glass and steel, baby. And flying car technology is for sure just around the corner! I admire Drayton Tower for being itself and not even pretending to fit in with its surroundings at all. It looks like a drag queen standing tall in the middle of a philosophy convention. I do not consider it an attractive building, but it is certainly striking. Sometimes it has a vague Mad Men-esque appeal.

Drayton Tower was originally full of small apartments that served low income people and veterans and the like. There were regular folks living in it right into the early 2000s. Some of them had been living there for decades when they were thrown out in 2007. A local realtor bought the building and was going to renovate it, BUT THEN the Great Recession happened. So, a bunch of people were rendered homeless, then had to watch their former home sit empty for years. Under its current ownership, Drayton Tower has been renovated into luxury condominiums. Because luxury housing is definitely what we need in a city with a poverty rate over 20% and a housing crisis that has been increasing in severity for years. I may be ambivalent on the architectural style, but I am thoroughly irritated at the business model.

Directly across the street from Drayon Tower is a slightly younger building that seems not entirely comfortable in its own skin- the DeSoto Hotel.

Main hotel entrance from across the street

The patio

A close-up on the entrance

It’s two big brown boxes with a smaller brown box connecting them in the middle. And lots of huge, reflective windows for confused birds to slam into. That’s good design, right? On top of that, I have a personal vendetta against revolving doors, one of which occupies the main entrance. They’re just so unnecessary, you know? Revolving doors are the perfect expression of mid-20th century hubris. “Oh, let’s take something as simple and practical as a door and make it complicated for no real reason!”

The DeSoto is trying so hard to be interesting in the details, but the thing is just kind of dumpy as a whole. It was the Hilton DeSoto my entire life until recent years. The original DeSoto Hotel was bought by Hilton and demolished to build this one. The old DeSoto was one of the seminal losses on the Savannah landscape, right up there with the City Market. Old timers around here are surly about it to this day. Here’s the original hotel:

The Liberty Street side, looking west

The Liberty Street side, looking east

The Madison Square side

A bad trade-off for us. The DeSoto was built in 1890, a time when Savannah was thriving as a port and a tourist destination, and locals hailed the facility as “the jewel of Savannah”. Everyone was so proud of it. Sadly, love is not all you need. In the 1960s, Savannah was decades into grinding economic struggle, our preservation movement was new, and our Historic District was still just the bad part of town. Hilton bought the Desoto and, rather than even trying to retrofit the old building for AC and other modern amenities, they tore it down and built this version.

Well, Hilton sold it to a company called Southerly a few years ago. I actually sat down at lunch with their representatives, who asked me for ideas and improvements. There’s physical limits to what can be done here, but they have made changes. They opened up that patio on Liberty Street, for one thing. The building never used to interact with the street at all. There’s live music out there now. There have been some attractive interior renovations. The hotel is still generally unloved by the populace, though, and I don’t think there’s any fixing that. It’s just an ugly building barging into the very center of the Historic District. The 60s, man. Perhaps they should have dropped a little more acid and found inspiration for a more interesting design?

I had to limit how much attention I gave to hotels and parking garages in this blog post, otherwise that’s all it would be. But there is one more hotel as lamentable as the DoSoto, and that is the Hyatt Regency.

Main entrance at the Bay Street level

Distant view from the riverwalk

The span over River Street

It was completed in 1980. The developer responsible, Merritt Dixon, has been dead a while, which is the only good thing I have to say about him. I often talk about the Hyatt whenever my walking tours cover that portion of River Street. I like to contrast it with the Bohemian right next door, which is decades newer, yet far less disruptive to its historic setting. The Hyatt replaced the Neal-Blun building, along with a handful of other commercial structures.

The view from Bay Street

The view from River Street

Hyatt instigated quite the battle between preservation-minded folks (and I’m sure also anyone who hates ugly buildings), City Council, and the developer. Merritt Dixon originally wanted a 14-story high-rise. The “compromise” agreed upon instead is a featureless 6-story box hunched between City Hall and The Grand Bohemian and squatting menacingly across River Street. Proof, if you ever needed it, that compromise is not always a good thing.

So, how did the Hyatt end up there? I think part of the answer has to be the City had just spent loads of money reviving River Street. That included building our river walk, paving Factor’s Walk, and generally making the waterfront amenable to business owners who might be inclined to open up shop there. River Street used to be the port of Savannah. The buildings that face it used to be warehouses. It all fell into neglect and abandonment after the port built new facilities farther upriver. The old wooden docks were sliding away into the water and everything was generally gross. Bringing it all up to code and making River Street a pleasant attraction took several years and millions of dollars. So, it’s no surprise City Council was anxious to get a return on that investment as quickly as possible.

Enter the Hyatt Regency. Savannah was nowhere close to the economic and tourism powerhouse it is today, but Hyatt was willing to spend money on a big new project here. They promised to create jobs (as developers always do) and even swore the hotel would bring in conventions. That’s the magic word, basically. City councils do love conventions. Preservationists were appalled, but our preservation movement was younger then- only 25 years old. It was barely through graduate school and the grown-ups didn’t always take it seriously. So, the Neal-Blun building got the wrecking ball and we got a hotel that is actually all parking garage on its lower half and has a rooftop bar from which patrons can see only the better rooftop bar on top of the Bohemian across the way. Lame.

This list would be incomplete if I did not include a set of buildings that are among the most despised in town: the bathroom tile buildings on Telfair Square.

The Juliette Gordon Low building, home to the Army Corps of Engineers

A view of the same building, covering the entire block

Old IRS office building

You can see why we all call ‘em that, right? These are another architectural assault from the 1980s. It’s a set of 3, the two smaller of which are on the east side of Telfair Square and the largest of which occupies the entire block off the southeast corner of the square. The federal government forced them on us back in the day. The large structure (the Juliette Gordon Low building) houses offices for the Army Corps of Engineers. The other two contain other federal offices and IRS facilities. These are fugly as hell and inconsiderate of their setting. I don’t know who thought these were a good idea. The JGL building is especially bad because the scale of it is completely out of step with anything else in this part of town. It takes up a whole block, completely unbroken. Its mass is a problem more so than its height. On top of that, the building covers York Lane, closing it off and turning it into an entrance for their parking garage. Such a selfish interruption of our original street grid.

Recently, the feds have demolished one of these old, ugly triplets and replaced it with a new, ugly triplet.

The US Courthouse Annex building

Did I miss something here? Because I feel like I did. Is that not the exact same thing they just tore down, but, like, modernized a little bit? It’s the same thing, right? It’s even the same color scheme! And allegedly this is the US Courthouse Annex, but would you have noticed that if I hadn’t just told you? Can you see those words in the stonework above the entrance? CAN YOU? This is like staring at one of those 3-D eye puzzles that were so popular back in the 90s. I was good at those when I was a kid. But they gave a lot of people a hard time, and what’s going to happen when one of those people is driving around and around Telfair Square looking for this building while their panic mounts and their hands get all sweaty because they’re about to miss their court date? That was not a people-friendly design choice at all.

I am so dismayed the design firm did not choose to match this up with the eye-popping federal courthouse directly behind it.

Modern courthouse annex on the left, old Federal Courthouse and Post Office on the right.

Like with the Cathedral and its social hall, this is another one that makes me ask “How could you construct this in the shadow of that and not feel ashamed?” The old Federal Courthouse and Post Office was erected in 1899, then expanded in 1930. It’s made of Georgia marble, is a mix of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival, and is gorgeous. I know the short answer to my question is “money,” but damn. There’s a difference between understanding how much things cost and understanding the true cost of things. Decades of looking at cheap, unattractive construction is a steep price to pay for saving a buck.

So far, we have covered damage inflicted by a variety of industries: banking, hotels, the Church, the Feds. What about… the arts?

The Savannah Civic Center

The Savannah Civic Center was completed in 1972. In a way, it feels like a companion to the DeSoto even though they have nothing to do with each other. It’s the brown brick and those tall arches that look like they’re trying to be… something… but not really succeeding. Even if the Civic Center was pure magnificence constructed of interlocking unicorns, I would have to question its value considering how much real estate is swallowed up by its attendant parking lot. What we have here is basically a parking lot with an entertainment venue attached. What used to be here was an entire block of housing, plus the Bulloch House, pictured below.

Bulloch House, built c. 1818

Architect William Jay finished construction on the Bulloch House about 1818. Should you tour the Owens-Thomas House while you’re in Savannah, you’ll hear a lot about him. We’re all William Jay fangirls around here now, but that wasn’t always the case. In 1917, the City demolished what was one of the finest Greek Revival homes in America to make way for a shiny new City Auditorium.

Savannah’s City Auditorium

It’s nice, I guess. But that theatre also fell prey, in time, to our destructive impulse. Its corpse now lies buried under the east end of the modern Civic Center’s parking lot. And now the Civic Center is also staring down its own demise. The MLK Arena composed the bulk of the structure and it’s been made useless by the completion of our new arena farther west. The Johnny Mercer Theatre was always an unsatisfying performance venue and its complete removal along with the arena was recommended by the Urban Land Institute when our previous City Council commissioned a study from them a few years ago. Part of the promise and appeal of the new Enmarket Arena was that it would allow us to demolish the entire Civic Center and restore those lots around Orleans Square for housing. We would also be able to reclaim Elbert Square (which has been under Montgomery Street for decades). But here comes Alderman Nick Palumbo gumming up the works and insisting we can restore the Johnny Mercer Theatre into something like the Gaillard Center in Charleston and that it will definitely be worth the trouble and money. This frustrates me quite a lot. Nick Palumbo is not my alderman, but am I still allowed to slap the stupid out of him?

I’ve got one last landmark on my hit-list today and it is grievous. I consider it absolutely the fugliest thing in the Historic District and possibly in the whole city. My husband insisted I find some place in this blog post to use the phrase “dog-ugly,” so I reserved it for the absolute worst of the worst. I present to you the one parking garage I chose to put on this list.

It does not get better, no matter what angle you view it from. People on my tours have asked me, “Is that still under construction?” They are quite understandably confused by the exposed I-beams (dripping rust onto the sidewalk below like tetanus stalactites) and the visible chain-link wrapped around each level. Alas, gentle reader and beloved tourists, this is the finished product. I don’t know when this parking garage was built, but it’s been there for decades. Somebody paid money for that and somebody got paid for that (which you should remember next time Imposter Syndrome is making you feel anxious about your own job performance). This parking garage does not look post-modern, only post-apocalyptic. I don’t know who the “architect” was, but it must have been someone who had a violent hatred of sighted people as well as any blind people with especially keen intuition. I’m not sure it even has a name. Is it just the Congress Street parking garage? If we want to tear it down, will Nick Palumbo insist we keep this one too?

So there you have my least favorite things in the Historic District. I can find nothing redeeming about them and live for the day when they shall be replaced with something better. I mean, I lived to see the City Market parking garage destroyed and Ellis Square restored in its place, so anything’s possible.*

*As long as Nick Palumbo doesn’t screw it up.

Sheltering in place ≠ hibernation

Well, COVID-19 has thrown everyone’s best-laid plans up in the air. I know you’d rather be here than sheltering in place at home. March, April, and May are usually the busiest time of the year; not just for myself as a tour guide, but for Savannah’s entire entertainment and hospitality industry. Plus, the weather is spectacular right now, y’all. However, our entire Spring season has collapsed and your vacation plans have been ruined. But if that’s the only thing in you life that has been ruined this year, you’re actually doing pretty well.

Lucky for you (and me!), our local performers have made a lot of great work available online for your socially distant pleasure. Just because we can’t go anywhere doesn’t mean we have to hibernate in our little caves like bears. Here is a list of just a few things I was able to pull together. Some of these are already past, but you can view the archive, and some have an ongoing schedule.

1. The Psychotronic Film Society.

   • I have written before about how much I love the PFS. You can review that blog post here. Well, now you can kick back at 8pm every Sunday and Wednesday night and enjoy a weird and obscure movie! Just join the PFS Facebook group to get updates and receive invitations. For each viewing, Jim shares a link to a YouTube playlist that includes his recorded introduction and that night’s film. Then you can hustle on over back to Facebook and join in the discussion about the movie. It’s almost as good as hanging out with all of us for real at the Sentient Bean. Want to show your love and support? Take a minute to throw a few dollars into Jim’s pocket via PayPal or you can Venmo him some money at James-Reed-109. Anyone who donates at least $5 will receive an email from Jim with a link to download a very special Psychotronic film to keep for your very own. You will also be entered into a drawing to win some nifty PFS swag.

2. Seldom Sober, Irish duo

   • The mayor cancelled St. Patrick’s Day this year (a real good move in hindsight), but you can still dance a little jig with Seldom Sober to accompany you. Michael, who is a personal friend of mine, sings and plays guitar. His colleague, Colleen, accompanies on the violin. They perform a set about 40 minutes long each Tuesday night at 8pm. Just go to their Facebook page to tune in live or to play past videos for yourself. Hope to see you there in the comments! If you would like to leave a tip for this pair of generous musicians, you can do so on this page of their website. You can also buy their album or a t-shirt!

3. Quarantine Concerts

   • “The idea first came to creator Michael Gaster when he would stream (Facebook Live) some of the concerts he was working on. Viewers would comment how they used to love to go see live music but no longer could, and how great it was to be able to see a live local performance from home. With a deeper appreciation for making entertainment accessible, Michael felt there was a need to bring quality live local entertainment to those less mobile. Now, with so many events being cancelled due to COVID-19, performers having fewer places to perform, and would-be audience members having no place to go, Michael knew it was time for Quarantine Concerts.”

   • View the list of upcoming local performers on Facebook.

4. Savannah Music Festival

   • This was one of the most unfortunate casualties of the COVID-19 shutdown. Next to St. Patrick’s Day, the SMF is Savannah’s premiere springtime festival. It’s two weeks of live performance by artists from all over the world and representing various genres. However, they made up for the tragic cancellation as best they could by setting up the SMF at Noon30 Concert Series. Each day when the festival would have been happening, one of the performers who had been booked did a live demonstration of their music. The dates are already past, but you can watch all the videos on SMF’s YouTube playlist. If you like what you see, consider purchasing tickets and planning a vacation for next Spring!

5. Savannah Philharmonic #SavPhilMusicMonday

   • Aw. Keitaro Harada just got here to be the new Music and Artistic Director of the Philharmonic and then a pandemic torched the whole season. It’s just not fair. But the Phil is rolling with the punches. Each Monday through September 14th you can enjoy Harada’s (remote) interview with a member of the orchestra. Videos run 10-ish minutes and finish with one of the Phil’s previous recorded performances. Here is the link to the YouTube playlist.

6. The Trainwrecks

   • This local band describes themselves as “Americana with a Rock ‘n Roll presentation”. If you’ve been here before, you might have caught them playing at The Jinx or any number of local bars. Visit their Facebook to see what’s playing and when.

7. NSFW DJ Collective

   • Miss hangin’ out at the club? NSFW DJ Collective is live streaming sets from local DJs via their Facebook page.

8. Sean Maloney, 5 o’clock Sessions

   • Local musician performs every day at 5pm. Tune in to his Facebook to follow along. And since it’s 5 o’clock, maybe pretend you’re in Savannah by listening with a drink in hand? Put it in a to-go cup just for us.

9. Keystone Postcard

   • Tune in to their “live from our driveway” performances every Wednesday from 4-6 and every Sunday from 1-3. Videos on their Facebook page.

10. Lyn Avenue, Six String Sippin’

    • Lyn Avenue will live stream a performance every Friday at 8pm through the rest of April. Check their Facebook for the most recent video.

11. Matt Eckstine, Shed Shows

    • Tune in to Ecktine’s Facebook feed for his music live stream each Saturday about 7:30. 25% of all tips you leave go to Second Harvest!

12. Odd Lot Improv streams improv games live

    • One of our local improv comedy troupes is doing “home editions” of their usual Monday Night Madness, Friday Funnies, and even their murder mystery show! Tune in to their Facebook to watch the fun and games and to participate via the comments.

13. Front Porch Improv Storytime

    • Savannah’s other local improv troupe does live readings of children’s books at 1pm every day. They have also made an archive available of their past performances. Visit their Facebook for more info.

14. Velvet Caravan

    • This is one of my favorite local bands. They describe themselves as “one of the most unusual ensembles in the area. Combining Gypsy, Honky-Tonk, Swing and Latin, this band plays upbeat tunes from all over the world with thunderous virtuosism and relentless sense of humor.” Velvet Caravan has been conducting live streams and listening parties on their Facebook page. Go give them a listen and go give them a few pennies for their trouble via PayPal or Venmo.

Well, sheltering in place is a bummer, but I hope you turn this unexpected downtime into an opportunity to acquaint yourself with just a little bit of our local talent. Maybe you’ll cook up some ideas for your next vacation here. Don’t forget to leave tips (if you can) for the art you enjoy. And while you’re on my website, pop over to my shopping page and order yourself something nice from one of our local businesses. They’ll be happy to ship to you. And if you want to help out yours truly, purchase a gift card now that you can redeem whenever you make it here. Just go to my Booking page and look for the Purchase Gift Card button beneath its respective tour.

Hope to see you soon!

The Legacy of Igbo Landing

My husband and I celebrated our anniversary in September by spending a weekend just down the coast on Saint Simon’s Island. Aside from strolling along the beach, there are a number of historical sites we were interested to visit. Some significant places, though, remain inaccessible, unmarked and hardly acknowledged. For example:

The small selection of photos up above is the closest I was able to get to a site known as Igbo (or Ebo) Landing. This is the view as you take Sea Island Road across Dunbar Creek. Sadly, there is no access to the actual landing because it is located on private property. There isn’t even a historical marker, which I think is a real shame.

What is Igbo Landing and why is it important? I didn’t know anything about the event that took place there 217 years ago, had never heard of it at all until I was in my 30s. A friend of mine stumbled across the information, on Tumblr of all places, and was thoughtful enough to text it to me. (Thanks, Shelley!) I felt stupid for not knowing about something that I’ve since realized is woven throughout Low Country cultural memory. So, here I am, trying to save you from feeling just as stupid.

In May of 1803, about 75 Igbo tribespeople who had been captured in what is now Nigeria were purchased in Savannah, then shipped down the coast to work on plantations belonging to John Couper and Thomas Spalding. They staged a mutiny during the voyage, drowned the crew, and grounded the boat in Dunbar Creek on Saint Simon’s Island. Knowing they had no way home and no hope of freedom in this strange land, they walked into the creek (singing a song of their native country, according to some accounts) and committed mass suicide by drowning. It is unclear how many died (at least a dozen), how many vanished, and how many were “salvaged” by slave catchers.

This heroic act of resistance has been rippling through the memory of Black America ever since. It is believed to have given rise to “the myth of the flying Africans” which pervaded regional African American folklore well into the 20th century. It is still being retold to this day, as in the children’s book The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales by Virginia Hamilton. It’s also referenced in works by Toni Morrison, Alex Haley and a variety of other African American writers. Stories about enslaved people flying right back home to Africa turn up again and again among the people interviewed for the book Drums and Shadows: Survival Stories Among the Georgia Coastal Negros. As part of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writers Project conducted interviews with dozens of Black people- from Yamacraw here in town all the way down the coast to St. Mary’s. Some of them were old enough to remember having been enslaved. The stories were published in 1940. This quote, from page 79 of the paperback edition, gives you an idea how the legend was usually transmitted:

“Muh gran say ole man Waldburg down in St. Catherine own some slabes wut wuzn climatize an he wuk um hahd an one day dey wus hoein in duh fiel an duh dribuh come out an two ub um wuz unuh a tree in duh shade, an duh hoes wuz wukin by demsef. Duh dribuh say ‘Wut dis?’ an dey say, ‘Kum buba yali kum buba tambe, Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe,’ quick like. Den dey rise off duh groun an fly away. Nobody ebuh see um no mo. Some say dey fly back tuh Africa. Muh gran see dat wid he own eye.”

The flying African myth gets told again by characters in the Julie Dash film Daughters of the Dust. I watched that last year when it was streaming on Netflix, but it’s not available on that platform anymore. You can rent it on Amazon, though. Daughters of the Dust is steeped in Georgia coastal folklore and historical experience. The movie depicts the moment in time when a lot of old Black communities uprooted themselves from the islands, Ossabaw especially, and formed new communities on the Savannah mainland. The hurricanes of 1893 and 1898 had just been too traumatizing for island-dwellers. The new hamlets they formed became Sandfly, Montgomery, and Pin Point. You can visit those neighborhoods to this day. I enthusiastically recommend a visit to the Pin Point Heritage Museum.

And finally, reference to the suicide at Igbo Landing appeared in American cinema in 2018 with Killmonger’s last line in Black Panther: “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from ships because they knew death was better than bondage.” So, you’ve encountered the Igbo suicide before, even if you didn’t realize it.

As I said at the top, there is no marker or access. Just a quick view down the creek as one crosses the bridge. However, there was a ceremony in 2017 to commemorate the people who chose death over enslavement. The Brunswick News has the article. Larry Hobbs asserts the tale of Igbo defiance is well known even in Nigeria. Several Igbo tribal leaders came to Georgia and conducted a ceremony to lay the spirits of the dead to rest there at Dunbar Creek.

Finding out about the mass suicide at Igbo Landing enacted a permanent change on the way I view African American history. It wasn’t necessarily because of the story itself, but because I learned about it after the 2016 election. I was in the frame of mind where the notion of “resistance” resonated with a new intensity. As I read about the event I thought to myself, “How bold and poignant! Suicide as resistance against oppression!” Suddenly a hallway lit up in my brain which led me to a new perspective. For the first time I consciously thought of enslaved people as people who actively resisted their condition.

It wasn’t that I ever thought folks liked being enslaved. The problem is the way American history was taught to me. I don’t even mean to say I had teachers who were slavery apologists or anything like that. I’m talking about well-meaning and smart teachers who I wish had connected a few dots for me when I was much younger. They taught me about the Stono Rebellion, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, etc. They taught me that sometimes slaves would pretend to be stupid or sick or to have broken their tools in order to get out of work. I’ve done plenty of reading on my own and know that slaves would sometimes run away only to catch a break for a little while, not with the intention of staying gone forever. I know slave owners complained constantly about how black people always “dissembled” around white people (as if being honest with white people were ever a safe option for them). People did teach me these things. I did learn these things. But I learned of them as distinct events, individual occurrences.

The shortcoming in my education was that no one ever connected all of it for me into an ongoing narrative of active resistance. I understand now that I was left with an impression of enslaved Africans as passive about their fate. It was very subtle and entirely unconscious and I’m sure it’s a problem that afflicts most white people in America and probably a fair number of Black people as well. Why does it matter? I have found this shift in perspective to be absolutely vital. We relate differently to people we perceive as having fought for something versus people we perceive as having been given something. If white folks in America walk around with the vague impression that enslaved people were too downtrodden or indifferent or (ugh) satisfied with their situation to fight for their own freedom, then it allows for the insidious sensation that African Americans today should be grateful for their “rescue” via the Civil War and that white people did all the work for them.

But the truth is Black people were always doing the work. Occasionally in big ways with an outright rebellion, but mostly in a thousand small ways. They ran away temporarily, or broke their tools, or feigned illness to steal back just a little bit of their own time. They fled and formed maroon colonies deep in swamps where nobody could get to them. They had side-hustles to earn cash, on top of being enslaved 24/7. They ran secret schools at the risk of being imprisoned or whipped. Most conductors on the Underground Rail Road were Black. Freedmen set money aside to purchase their loved ones. Enslaved people set money aside to purchase themselves. They defied the law by staying out beyond curfew or drinking in taverns. They tried to make use of the law for their own sake, as was the case with Dred Scott. The list goes on and on.

Armed defiance is not the only type of defiance that matters. And we all know every major act of armed rebellion in American history ended very badly for the slaves conducting it. Enslaved Africans in America were never passive about their situation; they were just badly, badly outgunned. But they were always working for their own liberation and survival and success. They were not “given” their freedom in 1865. They had been fighting for it constantly since 1619. White kids educated in public schools like me just have a hard time seeing that because so much of what they did was necessarily in secret or it’s not included in our curriculum or it’s depicted unflatteringly from their owners’ point of view or, sometimes, it’s just not all linked together in a meaningful way.

This is the difference learning about Igbo Landing has made in my life. I knew facts before, all scattered and separate from each other. But now they have come together like pixels on a computer screen resolving into an image I can actually see. I was missing this insight for my whole life. I hope now it will improve your understanding as you go forward and you’ll have the head start I did not.

So, let's talk about THAT monument....

Ever since Nazis with tiki torches marched in Charlottesville, outraged over a college’s decision to remove a monument of Robert E. Lee, it’s routine now for me to get questions on my tours about the fate of Confederate monuments in Savannah. This being a picturesque southern town which in many respects still looks much the same as it did right before the Civil War, I’m not surprised people arrive here with this question on their minds. So, I’ll lay out all the facts for you right here as well as I can.

First, the short version: we have almost no Confederate monuments to be concerned about in this city. We really only have the one.

An unobscured view of the monument.

Now, it is one of the largest in the country and it’s bang in the middle of Forsyth Park, possibly the most popular recreational space in town. It sounds like we’re making up for lack of quantity, doesn’t it? There is something mysterious about our Confederate monument, though- almost everyone fails to notice it. I do not know why. Perhaps because it’s too tall? You can’t get close to it because of the fence? You can’t ever get a good picture because it’s always backlit? You also can’t get a good picture because the farther you step back to try and capture the whole thing the more trees are obstructing your view? It’s just not a very attractive or photogenic monument and everyone would rather take pictures of the gorgeous, iconic (and totally non-controversial) white fountain just yards away? Hell if I know. But even if it doesn’t announce its presence very well, does that mean we’re not obligated to re-assess its place in Savannah’s landscape?

To the credit of Savannah’s (often ineffective and controversy-shy) City Council, they actually took proactive steps to gauge local sentiment and decide if we should do anything at all. Before I get to the results of those surveys and meetings, let’s put our Confederate monument in context. First, here is what it looked like when first built.

Confederate Memorial as it originally appeared.

One characteristic that differentiates our monument from so many others around the country that have already been removed is it’s authenticity. So many such statues were built in the early 20th century, a very intentional expression of white supremacy as Jim Crow laws stripped away the hard-fought progress African Americans had won for themselves during Reconstruction. The next wave of Confederate monument building occurred throughout the Civil Rights movement, again as a very deliberate white supremacist backlash against the rights African Americans were fighting hard to win for themselves.

But our statue here was built in 1875. That doesn’t make it ok, but that does make it a genuine artifact of the time period others only allege to represent. Reconstruction hadn’t even ended yet. What also sets our statue apart is it does not commemorate a person or battle or even the Confederate government. It’s not actually a monument, but a memorial to Savannah’s Confederate dead. There’s a large bronze plaque on its eastern face that reads “Blow from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live.” It’s genuinely poignant and a little bit eerie. The project was commissioned and the money raised by the Ladies Memorial Association. Just as it used to always be women who prepared dead loved ones for burial, it was a bunch of women who attempted to lay Savannah’s grief to rest. However, they still did so with characteristic southern white woman spleen. The pedestal was carved in Canada and sent down here by boat instead of rail because the Ladies Memorial Association did not want any part of the memorial to touch Yankee soil. Well… it was only ten years after the war after all.

Now, you may have noticed my picture of the monument and the old photograph of it look quite different. That’s because once the thing was all put together back in 1875, everyone found it just a little bit, um, tacky. (Southern white lady grief is very melodramatic.) So, they altered it. They removed both of the carved statues (which are quite nice on their own), closed up the lower alcove and topped the pedestal with a newly commissioned bronze figure, which I think was actually cast in New York. It was a guy who handled that transaction, Charles Coldcock Jones, Jr., if I remember correctly (I might not be). I guess he was less concerned than his female counterparts about besmirching the memorial with Yankee soil. The original statues are pictured below. I apologize for being unable to find better quality images. The figure which used to occupy the lower alcove is “Silence” and the one that used to be at the very top is “Judgement”.

Close-ups of the statues Silence (left) and Judgement (right). Silence now stands in the Gettysburg section of Laurel Grove Cemetery and Judgement was moved to Laurel Hill Cemetery in Thomasville.

Interesting that “Silence” and “Judgement” were the allegorical figures the Ladies Memorial Association found most appropriate to honor Savannah’s fallen soldiers. Would they be pleased with the loud hysteria of torch-waving Nazis? Would they find it distasteful? “Silence” and “Judgement” are calmly presiding over their respective cemeteries these days. “Silence” was moved to the part of Laural Grove Cemetery that contains Savannah soldiers who died at Gettysburg and “Judgement” is in Laural Hill Cemetery in Thomasville, GA. As for their replacement? The man atop the pedestal is no one in particular. He’s a nameless Confederate private, a tattered Everyman. Seems appropriate for a conflict that is often described as being “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight”.

Our Confederate Memorial in its current form, with the bust of Lafayette McLaws on its north side. I only just noticed that insubordinate little squirrel at the bottom.

The memorial got another alteration in 1910. This bust of local Confederate Major General LaFayette McLaws was placed at its base on the north side, along with a matching bust of Colonel Francis Bartow on the south side. Both sculptures had originally been placed in Chippewa Square, but were removed to make way for the Oglethorpe monument in 1910. I guess it made sense to everyone at the time to cluster all the Confederate-themed stuff in one place, so off to Forsyth Park Bartow and McLaws went.

All that brings us up to the modern day. So, Nazis protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue and murdering people in Charlottesville led to nation-wide soul-searching about the old Confederacy and our current relationship to it. Savannah began it’s own introspection and realized, perhaps with some relief, that we hardly have any offending statues to fret about. We really love to avoid unpleasant conversations and difficult decisions in this city. But what to do about the one really big statue in Forsyth Park? The local news stations interviewed people, there were Letters to the Editor, etc. A few people getting reflexively defensive, a few people breathing fire in their enthusiasm to tear the thing down. But the reaction from most people was kind of a shrug, at least as far as I can tell. The City Council released an online survey to get some local input. The fact it was only accessible online makes me suspicious of its value in correctly representing Savannah’s demographics. Feels like a choice likely to bias the sample.

The result the City got was one that favored inaction, Savannah’s favorite kind of action. I was not surprised at all. The City still had plans to add some additional explanatory signage to the monument and they kicked around the idea of allowing McLaws and Bartow to join their Confederate brethren in Laural Grove Cemetery. Both men are buried there anyway. I thought it was a moderately satisfying option. All those plans got scuttled earlier this year, however, by the Georgia state legislature. They passed SB 77, which you can read here. TL;DR a bunch of good ‘ole boys got real nervous and felt the need to reassert their dominance over the narrative. Feels familiar. Everyone’s always gung-ho for “local control” until those localities indicate they might do something the legislature doesn’t like. We very nearly ended up with a statewide ban on plastic bag bans a few years ago because Tybee Island considered banning single-use plastic bags. The state legislature was going to prohibit a small seaside town from banning a type of litter that is particularly damaging to its local ecology. That was real micro-manage-y of them. Tybee City Council ended up not quite passing that ban anyway, but it was a revealing affair.

So, what now? We can’t (legally) do a whole lot at this point, even if we wanted to. What outcome would I have favored? I don’t personally feel one way or the other about our Confederate Memorial. It can stay or it can go. I feel absolutely sure that if someone were able to magic the whole thing out of the park silently in the dead of night, it would take days for most people to even notice. Again, it’s surprisingly easy to forget it’s there. The cost of total removal would have been steep, seeing as it’s so big. We can’t just throw a rope around it, pull it down, and truck it away in a pickup. I think it would have been appropriate to send McLaws and Bartow over to Laural Grove Cemetery. Some people get very huffy about any alterations and claim that’s “rewriting history,” but didn’t past Savannahians disrespect the monument’s original message when they moved the busts of those officers down there in the first place? We would just be putting things right and restoring the site to its original state.

Ideally, I would like to see the City work harder to promote Laurel Grove Cemetery to locals and visitors. It’s a far more appropriate and instructive memorial to the human cost of the Civil War, though it is often outshined by it’s more famous cousin, Bonaventure Cemetery. The City laid out Laural Grove in 1853. It is divided into two halves: white folks got buried in Laurel Grove North and black folks (slave and free) got buried in Laurel Grove South. Most of Savannah’s dead Confederates are in Laurel Grove North, the people they once owned buried nearby in the south section. The Cemetery contains white and black conscripted men, white men who joined up of their own volition, and the handful of free black Savannah men who volunteered for Confederate regiments (yes, there were a few). Laurel Grove is far more complex and representative a memorial than a single statue can ever be. Next time you visit Savannah, instead of letting your eye glance briefly over a monument that’s too tall and always backlit and thinking that’s the most we have to say about the Confederacy and the Old South, take a short drive over to Laurel Grove and let the dead tell you a more detailed story.

Peeling Back the Layers (revisiting the Berrien House)

“Stumbled upon your blog an enjoyed it. I am the head of Historic Preservation for Berrien House and have been working on the project for almost a decade. Would you like a tour?”

Say what? Man, my blog ain’t good for much, but it does send some interesting traffic my way now and again. That was the main text of an email I got out of nowhere on December 31, 2015. So, this guy named David Kelley was referring to my “Berrien the Past” blog from several years ago. If I asked David how he found that post, I don’t remember now what his answer was. I bet he was idly fishing around on Google for “Berrien House” and I snagged his lure. So, hey, I’m not gonna pass up an exclusive (and free of charge) opportunity to scope out the in-progress preservation effort on an 18th century Savannah mansion! We finally managed to schedule a rendezvous for February 5th, 2016. 

Local Revolutionary War hero John Berrien built his house at the corner of Broughton and Habersham Streets sometime in the 1790s. Until recently, it was the last unrestored 18th century mansion in the Historic District. See my original blog post if you want more details. 

This is what it looks like right now:

Pretty spiffy, right? Well, it’s come a long way. Previous owners had altered the house to make it apartments upstairs with retail space on the ground floor, alterations common to many old downtown buildings. There used to be large windows on the bottom that said "Pete's Shoe Repair". The lettering was still visible when restoration began. In fact, a former history professor of mine told me Pete's Shoe Repair closed up and the business vanished while still in possession of a pair of her shoes! The neglected hulk of the Berrien House stood on that corner all my life with its shop empty, its upper windows boarded, its wood siding covered in dull brown stucco. Below is a 1920s photograph of the house as storefront and tenements. It looked like this as far back as I can remember, except more dilapidated:

Courtesy the Georgia Historical Society.

Here is what it looked like when the current owner bought the place and major exterior work first got underway:

Makes you shiver, doesn't it?

What you see up there is how it looked after crews removed the stucco and took apart the ground floor so they could lower the basement back to its original height. (It had been raised to add the storefront.) Who would willingly entangle themselves with a money pit like that? No one less than a direct descendant of the original owner, that’s who! Andrew Berrien Jones is his name. Again, see my original “Berrien the Past” blog post for more info about him. The guy deserves a medal or something. Even now, this job is far from over.

This was the foyer as of my gratis tour in February, 2016:

Left: looking toward the back of the house and the rebuilt central staircase. Right: Looking out the front door of the house.

Oh no. That’s like breaking open a Kinder Egg and finding spiders inside. This is a nightmare if your plan is to fix up a house and live in it. Fortunately, Mr. Jones does most of his living in New York. However, it was a dream for me to see this historic building turned inside out.

David and I turned to the right and I had a gander at the parlor.

When you walk in the front door and look to the right, this is the doorway into the front parlor.

You can still see original moulding around the top of the wall up there on the left. The blue tape outline on the right is what the woodwork around the door would have looked like in the 18th century. That may be a detail that has to be replicated rather than restored. I don't know if any of that made it to the 21st century.

David showed me the remnants of walls that used to divide the front parlor when the place was broken up into several units. You can see their outline in the wood and the threshold to a door that is no longer there.

Ghost marks left in the wood floor by a wall and doorway that used to divide the room.

Old ceiling beams reinforced with new wood.

The picture up above shows the old ceiling beams, now accompanied by modern reinforcements. The City of Savannah required the upgrade in order to make the house compliant with hurricane-resistant building codes. David and I shared a giggle over that. The house has already survived numerous hurricanes (including one of the deadliest ever to strike the US), three major fires, one earthquake, a couple of ice storms, and decades of neglect. But sure, Zoning Board, your oversight has made the structure stable and safe for real this time!

Enjoy a few pictures below of old-timey building techniques and rescued doors and moulding.

Closeup view of old beams notched together and pegged in place.

Three different views of original door and hardware.

Carved wood moulding to be restored/replicated.

Now, I have to talk about wallpaper for a little while, which is only boring if it doesn't involve the restoration of an 18th century mansion. One of the first things David told me after I met him was how surprised he was at his own growing interest and expertise when it comes to historic wallpaper. Now, if you or I crave something new on our walls, we just tootle on down to Home Depot, look at some catalogues maybe, and pick whatever we want. We come home with a few roles and spend a weekend swearing enthusiastically as we wrangle the paper over the drywall. Any time we get bored with our current walls, it's cheap and easy enough to repeat this process. To most modern Americans, their neighbors' wallpaper doesn't convey anything except their neighbors' personal aesthetics. None of this was true for the Americans of yesteryear.

Old-timey folk decorated their houses to show off their wealth more so than any sense of good taste. This often included spending obscene amounts of money on rugs, drapery, wallpaper, etc. What they wanted was all the color and pattern money could buy. Want to see the most eye-poppingly loud and tacky home decorating in America? Do a historic house tour. (Looking at you, Davenport House.) Our forebears even risked their lives for the sake of flashy trends: there was a craze during the Victorian era for an especially vivid shade of green in wallpaper patterns, clothing, whatever. How was this color achieved? By treating the material with arsenic. People slowly poisoned themselves just to show off.

I haven't heard of any poisonous wallpaper in the Berrien House, but David has uncovered some remarkable artifacts. Decorating trends are pretty distinct and old wallpaper can be an invaluable guide to reconstructing a house's past. David has been literally peeling back layers of history, which has helped him discern the house's timeline of construction, additions, and renovations over the years.     

Examples of several different wallpapers David has uncovered. They date from different time periods.

If I remember correctly, that wallpaper right in the middle is the one that had David most excited. It's original to the house and was hand painted in France. The Davenport House is helping to replicated it.

Pictured below is wallpaper that was in an upstairs room, I think. It's a chintz pattern, almost exactly the same as what George Washington put up in what they call the Chintz Room at Mount Vernon. Different color scheme, but otherwise the same. Makes me wonder if Berrien and Washington (who were buddies) shared samples. Hmmm. I do appreciate the image of two American war heroes, with all the gravitas of being Founding Fathers, poring over wall paper catalogues, trying to decide if chartreuse is timeless or merely a fad.

Top: chintz paper in the Berrien House. Bottom: Chintz paper at Mount Vernon.

Newly uncovered chinoiserie patterned wallpaper.

What fascinated me more than the wallpaper itself was the technique of applying it. Perfectly smooth, straight drywall wasn't a thing in the 18th century. Did old-timey folk go through the trouble of plastering the walls, then cover up all that hard work? Not really, no. The photos below display two application techniques used in the Berrien House. One logistic to keep in mind is wallpaper back then did not come in long narrow rolls like it does now. It was applied in much smaller pieces, square by square. That sounds like a good idea and I wonder why we don't still do it that way. 

Anyway, what you're looking at on the left is old paper with muslin fabric used as backing. Paperhangers would apply the paper directly onto walls made of wooden boards, not plaster over lath. To make it lay smoothly, they covered that uneven wall surface with this layer of fabric first. It's kind of like doing papier mache. On the right, you see the same principle at use again, but with newspaper as backing instead of muslin. I guess someone decided to cut corners. That choice worked out well for David, though. The date on the newspaper (1796) helped date that part of the house.    

Left: muslin wallpaper backing Right: newspaper wallpaper backing.

Pictured below are diagrams of how the house was altered over the years. The Berrien family lived here until the mid 19th century, so each generation made changes to suit their needs, such as increasing the house's depth and adding sleeping porches to the back.

Top: a side view of the house showing its original profile and later additions onto the back. Also David's finger. Bottom: a quick sketch on plywood of the house's rear aspect before more additions were made to it in the 19th century.

The slanted beam up top is a holdover from the original first story roof line, before the height at the back of the house was extended.

Major John Berrien's House was built a couple of decades before Savannah's first true mansions (like the Owens-Thomas House) and well before Savannah's golden age as a cotton port. But he did build it just at the time our city began to experience some steady low-key prosperity, free of colonial mismanagement and uninterrupted by war. 1790-1820 was a pretty good few decades and Berrien was among those at the top of the social totem pole. He was also Collector of Customs at the port here for a while, so was obligated to make a good showing for international visitors. The relative grandeur of his home spoke to his own status, but was also a way of impressing upon outsiders the increasingly refined profile of Savannah itself. Whether it was true or not, that's the impression he wanted them to take away. Hence, all the fancy wallpaper. In addition, the grandest rooms (such as the upstairs ballroom) were decorated with lavish wainscoting and moulding, pictured here. David told me something unusual about the moulding: it's carved of wood, not shaped from plaster. People even used to make details like that our of honest-to-god papier mache (heavily lacquered, of course), but not wood because it requires so much work.  

Top: two different styles of original wainscoting in the upstairs rooms. Bottom left: carved wood moulding around the ceiling of the upstairs ballroom. Bottom right: a closeup of the wooden wainscoting. 

All the pretty details are great, but it's also tons of fun to get a look at the inner workings of an old house. As I held that old hand-cast nail you see below, I told David I felt well-prepared to skewer any tiny vampires who might cross my path!

Left: hand-cast iron nails in old wood. Right: Me holding an original nail.

Mine and David's last stop was to the attic. Servants or slaves undoubtedly lived there at one time. Pictured here is old hand-cut wooden lath beneath crumbled plaster, right above a picture of slightly less old machine-cut lath.

Exposed plaster and lath in the attic. Top: hand-cut wooden lath. Bottom: newer, machine-cut lath.

Three view of the attic, plus some initials carved inside one of the dormers.

See this floorboard down here? What's with that finger-sized notch on the edge? Eh, it's exactly what it looks like. David had a funny story about when he first began exploring the attic and he poked his finger right there where it looks like it's supposed to go. Sure enough, the board levered up and there was a hidey-hole underneath full of old liquor bottles! Somebody hid their stash up there in the attic! Was it a servant? Someone's errant kid? Did someone need to hide their booze when Prohibition-era police broke up their Flapper party? We shall never know.

A floorboard in the attic with a suspicious notch....

To my knowledge, no one has yet given Andrew Berrien Jones a medal, but they did give his house its very own historic marker. I ran into David Kelley and Jones himself in the bar of the 17Hundred90 one evening while conducting my Lightly Sauced tour. David introduced me to Andrew and let me know there was a ceremony and reception planned to celebrate the new marker that Friday. October, Friday the 13th, of all days. Easy to remember, so I managed to attend. There were some changes and new progress, but the house still has a long way to go. I found some informative new diagrams to take pictures of, which you can see below.

Another drawing depicting the house and various additions and changes made throughout the years.

A front ways blueprint.

Hors d'oeuvres at the dedication of the new plaque.

The house has a spiffy new historical marker on Habersham Street.

I hope you enjoyed this virtual tour of historic preservation in action. The Berrien House progresses slowly, but then, so does Savannah.

My Favorite Savannah Things #1: The Psychotronic Film Society

I shall perform a public service and begin listing, one at a time, all the things to do or places to go in Savannah that I think not enough visitors (and sometimes locals) know about. Many of these will be things I regularly post about on my Facebook page or events I list on my website calendar, but I will be able to include more detail here. This is the place to find out who these people are, what such-and-such organization is all about, and what the venue is like. 

The first entry on my list of favorite things? The Psychotronic Film Society. I love it so much and I want to share the love with others so much, I would bodily shove my tourists in the door and force them to partake if I didn't know such rudeness would tank my TripAdvisor rating. And what the hell is the Psychotronic Film Society? In brief, it's a film screening at a downtown café called The Sentient Bean almost every Wednesday night at 8pm, and sometimes special screenings at The Muse Arts Warehouse. Who runs this so-called "society"? Really it's just the one guy. Just Jim. I've mentioned him before- he's the drummer for local band Superhorse. Before I ever knew he was a musician, though, he was the guy who showed the weird movies. Some people know him only as "MOVIE MAN!" like he's some kind of celluloid vigilante. I cannot remember my first encounter or conversation with the weird-movie-guy any more than I can remember what was the first Psychotronic Film I watched. I only know it is meet and becoming that Jim and the PFS are a part of my life now.

What can you expect when you attend the Sentient Bean on PFS night? What does Jim do, exactly? The Celluloid Avenger rescues cinephiles from mediocrity by showing only two types of movies: very good ones and very bad ones. The picture may not be one you like, but it will be one you always remember. Some of the best movie-viewing experiences I've ever had were on PFS night. Ticket prices usually range from $6-$8, purchased at the register. The café has coffee, food, and a little beer and wine as well.  

Sometimes Jim's choice is nearly mainstream, such as when he screened The Wicker Man as part of the Psychotronic Film Festival one year. Not the crap one with Nicholas Cage, the good one with Christopher Lee (may he rest in peace). That was the first time I had ever seen it (it's one of my favorite movies now) and also the first time I ever saw a standing room only crowd at the Sentient Bean. Jim screened a fairly well-known Finnish film for Christmas one year called Rare Exports. I've been begging him to reprise it every Christmas since. However, severe obscurity usually characterizes the offerings. The movie that blows my mind the most even now is a Czech film called Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea. I have never seen a movie succeed so well as both a time travel story and a comedy. (Yes, it's better than Back to the Future.) And there were Nazis! Time-traveling Nazis! (Take that, Robert Zemeckis.) 

On the opposite (terrible) end of the spectrum, there have been some Godfrey Ho movies; various cheesy rip-offs of mainstream blockbusters; and, yes indeed, a special screening of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. The most recent bad movie I saw at The Bean was a sweaty train wreck called The Maddening. It was not merely bad, it was ambitiously bad. John Huston's son Danny Huston directed it and you could tell he really believed he was making a good movie. He put so much love into that movie. The cast was crawling with A-listers and character actors and a fully insane Burt Reynolds. It just... it all went horribly, gloriously wrong somehow, and we the audience were privileged to revel in this overwrought dreck. Imagine if Alfred Hitchcock had been great with camera work, but God-awful at script writing. Something like that. It was magnificent.  

What else do I like about PFS night? The crowd. Sometimes there are a fair number of people, but mostly there are regulars- we happy few that return week after week, ready to buckle up and let Jim have the wheel. Illuminating the PFS roster are Jack, former guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers; David Stone, Academy Award winning sound designer; Axelle Kieffer, local artist; a rotating assortment of activists, baristas, social butterflies; and, of course, one tour guide who usually takes Wednesdays off. The truth, however, is that the regular crowd doesn't come just for the movies. They come for Jim. Each Wednesday is a ritualistic show of devotion and support for a good friend. Warm affection suffuses the room just as much as the scent of warm coffee. It's a good vibe, is what I'm saying.

Why is Jim so damn special? I dunno. Because he's always broke, but never bitter? Because each and every answer he gives to any question is a masterclass in circuitous storytelling? Maybe because he prefaces almost every film screening with a 25-minute lecture about that movie and the people who made it, usually concluding with the phrase "This film is extremely rare and has never been released in any format anywhere in the world," or "All the original negatives were destroyed in a warehouse fire," or "The studio was embarrassed and didn't want anyone to ever see this picture and destroyed all copies." (None of these is an exaggeration.) Or maybe it's because whenever I ask him, "Well then, Jim, how did you get a copy?" he's managed to avoid giving me an answer for years. Clearly, Jim is a wizard and each and every screening is actually some kind of magic show.  

So come and be spellbound either by the movie, the local characters, or the caffeine buzz. What better way to elevate a day as lame as Wednesday? You can keep up with the PFS by asking to join Jim's mailing list (psychotronicfilms@hotmail.com), visiting the Sentient Bean's website to check their events calendar, or following Jim's Film Scene column in our local newspaper. 

Savannah Scenes #4: The Conspirator (2010)

The Conspirator was the second major project to film in Savannah after the Georgia legislature did the first useful thing it's done in years and set up a highly competitive set of incentives for filmmakers to shoot in this state. Right before The Conspirator came the Miley Cyrus movie The Last Song. (Yeah, I'll have to watch that one day. Don't rush me.) Those two movies were preceded by a decade-long stretch of nothing after The Legend of Bagger Vance wrapped up in 2000. (Guess I'll have to watch that one someday too. Ugh, golf movies.) The surrounding states, especially the Carolinas and Alabama out competed Georgia for project after project. But as soon as the legislature passed those incentives, holy moly! It was like magic! I am not even kidding. Touchstone Pictures immediately bailed out of North Carolina to film The Last Song in Georgia and The American Film Company was right on their heels late in the summer with The Conspirator, both of them high-profile feature films.

Now, the presence of Miley Cyrus on Tybee Island was exciting, I'm sure, for certain demographics. But the non-teeny-bopper inhabitants of Savannah didn't have much to fangirl about until friggin' ROBERT REDFORD showed up to direct The Conspirator! So, there was a little something for everyone that summer.

Redford's movie is about a woman named Mary Surratt. She owned the boarding house where John Wilkes Boothe and his friends plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. She was hanged as a conspirator in the murder and was the first woman ever executed by the US government. Not the kind of pioneer she ever wanted to be, I'm sure. The movie is focused on the events of her trial and the emotional tribulations of her appointed attorney. He is at first reluctant to defend her, then increasingly doubtful about his government's commitment to true justice when it becomes apparent every bureaucrat around him wants to railroad Surratt into a guilty verdict for the sake of national closure, whether she actually knew what was going on in her boarding house or not.

The Conspirator was the inaugural project of a new studio called The American Film Company, whose mission is to depict true events in American history with complete accuracy. Have you ever wished you could just watch a movie instead of reading the book? Well, someone finally heard your cries. Despite being quite a small scale project with a tight budget, the movie attracted an impressive assembly of talent. Go look at the IMDB page- the cast is nothing but A-listers. Robin Wright played Surratt. James McAvoy played her lawyer Frederick Aiken. True, this is before those X-Men movies shot him into the stratosphere of superstardom, but he had already done some high-profile stuff. Kevin Kline is there too as the ever-so-slightly villainous Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War. There are even some cult favorites in the cast. Stephen Root is in this movie, for God's sake! Stephen Root! I can't remember why, but who cares? It's Stephen Root!

Now, the story takes place in Washington D.C. in 1865. As we all know, modern day D.C. bears almost no resemblance to 1865 D.C. So, when you need an authentic looking mid-to-late 19th century city that offers a variety of public and private architecture and access to interiors as well, who you gonna call? Savannah, Georgia, of course. Let's take a look at some of the local attractions standing in for D.C., shall we?

First up, and repeatedly throughout the movie, we have the Harper-Fowlkes House:

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The Harper-Fowlkes House, aka The Century Club

You'll see this building a lot in the movie. It serves as The Century Club, the place where the Union soldiers and the lawyers hang out all the time for drinking and joking and impressing the ladies. It's a house museum in actuality, built as a private home in the 1840s. It was rescued from decay and restored by a woman named Alida Harper-Fowlkes. She was doing the historic preservation thing in this town way before it was cool, back in the 1920s. As an aside, this house also appears momentarily at the end of the way-more-action-packed Lincoln movie called Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies. Don't worry. I'll get to that one eventually. Also, is America over its Abraham Lincoln phase now? I mean, it was just nonstop Lincoln for a few years there. Can we move on to, say, Benjamin Franklin? His biopic would basically be a porno with some lightning, a stove, and a pair of bifocals thrown in. Not nearly the kind of downer Lincoln's biography is.

This next exterior is the Owens-Thomas House:

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Exterior of the Owens-Thomas House

This is where a couple of Boothe's co-conspirators attempt to kill Secretary of State William Seward. They shot those bits inside the house too, but I neglected to take a screencap of that for some reason. Maybe because it was kind of dark and there wasn't a lot to see. The Owens-Thomas House is my favorite house museum and I highly recommend touring it if you ever visit Savannah. It was the first real mansion ever built here, it's beautiful, and the tours are very high quality.

Next up, we see Lincoln's funeral train pulling into a station full of mourners. The station in question is the Roundhouse Rail Road Museum, which also served as the backdrop for much of the movie Glory. I'm not sure, but the filmmakers might have used the steam engine that already resides there. The museum does periodic train rides with it.

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The Roundhouse Railroad Museum

Below is the U.S. Customs House, which sits on Bay Street at the corner of Bull. This building turns up in the movie as often as the Harper-Fowlkes House because it's where the lawyers do their serious lawyering. There is CGI D.C. just over the roof. Seeing an incomplete George Washington monument makes me giggle, for some reason.

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The very top of our Customs House with pretend White House in the background

Here is a better view of the building as a whole:

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A full view of the US Customs House on Bay Street

This is a shot of James McAvoy and Tom Wilkinson walking down the Customs House steps. The two of them have many important, philosophical, and very grown-up conversations about ethics and stuff inside and around the Customs House.

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James MacAvoy and Tom Wilkinson

The most significant amount of filming did not take place in the Historic District, however. A lot of plot and character interaction happens when Aiken, the lawyer, goes to visit Surratt. She is, naturally, being kept in prison at a fort in D.C. Our own Fort Pulaski served the purpose very nicely.

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Fort Pulaski (masquerading as a fort in 1865 Washington DC)

For the life of me, I cannot remember now if the crew built this military courtroom inside the fort or if they shot it elsewhere or on a sound stage. I've had this post on the back burner for a very long time and it's been ages since I watched the movie and listened to the commentary.

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Interior courtroom scene

Another "who" to appear in the "who's who" cast is Norman Reedus right here. He has a small role as another one of the conspirators. Much like James McAvoy, he made this movie just before he achieved serious fame as fan-favorite character Daryl on AMC's The Walking Dead (which is also filmed in Georgia, in case you didn't know). And then it was the year after this or maybe in 2012, he was a special guest at the Savannah Film Festival.  

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Ohai, Norman Reedus!

Another view of Fort Pulaski just because, uh, it looks nice.

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Walking through the portcullis into Fort Pulaski

This scene and the exterior of Mary Surratt's boarding house gave me fits because I could not work out which row of houses that was. It was familiar, oh, so familiar, but recognition only teased at the edge of my brain. I actually stalked around a few squares on Google Street View before I thought to myself, "Wait a minute. What's a part of the Historic District I hardly ever go to and so am unlikely to recognize? Must be... Chatham Square! Quick, Robin, to the Batcave!" And so it was. The houses you see below and the next picture beneath them (of the exterior of Surratt's house) are located on the northwest corner of Chatham Square, southernmost square on Barnard Street. I almost never go anywhere near Chatham Square unless I'm meeting people at The Savannah B&B for a tour. There's nothing wrong with Chatham. It's as pretty as any other square. I'm just never over there, for some reason.

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Just cover streets in dirt to get 1865

Please note that even Robert Redford cannot improve on the ancient tradition of throwing truckloads of dirt over the asphalt to make the streets look old-timey.

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Mary Surratt's boarding house

Here is a beautiful sunrise shot of James McAvoy riding up the path to Fort Pulaski. I have loved Pulaski since I was a little kid and my dad would take me there and teach me about rifled cannon and the Civil War and stuff. I cannot recall anymore what I thought of all these things when I was, what, six? I think more than anything I just liked that my dad was taking me places and showing me things. That and, if we went all the way out to Fort Pulaski, odds were good we would go the next couple miles down the road to the beach! I strongly recommend a visit to Fort Pulaski, especially if you have an interest in Civil War history.

This view shows you a little of Cockspur Island around the fort. Draining the island was the first job handed to young Robert E. Lee right after he graduated from West Point. Again, we have CGI D.C. in the background. If this movie were being made in 1938 it would have been a matte painting.

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A path on Cockspur Island leading up to Fort Pulaski... with fake Washington DC in the background

One of the coolest things about Pulaski when you're a little kid is that it has a moat. An honest to God moat like an actual medieval castle! With alligators in it! And there's a drawbridge with a spiky portcullis and everything! That was seriously thrilling for me when I was little. (Who am I kidding? It still fills my nerdy self with glee.)

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Walk across the drawbridge and through the portcullis to enter Fort Pulaski.

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The grounds inside the fort

Ok, so this guy you see in the center with the epic muttonchops? He lives around here and one day I'll learn his name, I'm sure. But he gets to be involved in every historic everything because he looks exactly right. Every reenactment, every living history presentation, every historical drama. He never shaves off those muttonchops. They are his livelihood. Until I learn his name, I shall simply call him Muttonchops.

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That guy. Damn, I wish I had his mutton chops.

Ah, here we see the dining room of the Harper-Fowlkes House. It was built at a time when all the rich folk paid heaps of money for artisans to make their pine baseboards look like marble and their plaster walls look like wood paneling. Not because they couldn't afford actual marble or paneling, but because it was so much more expensive and luxurious to have someone fake those things. Artists hand painted faux wood grain over every inch of this dining room back in the 19th century. It doesn't show up well at all in this picture, and that's too bad. But it's one of the most impressive things about the house, if you ever get a chance to tour it. The chandelier you see at the top of the picture is original to the house, one of many details Alida Harper-Fowlkes rescued and restored. The house's old fixtures were designed for gas, but were long ago updated for electricity.

The reason the room might seem curiously dark is, either because of his own sense of aesthetics or The American Film Company's commitment to verisimilitude, Robert Redford shot the movie pretty much entirely using natural light. So, those candles all over the place? Not just for show. Sunlight, candles, and lanterns are what they had to work with most of the time. Probably drove the director of photography (Newton Thomas Sigel) insane.

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Interior of the Harper-Fowlkes House

Below is an interior shot of the U.S. Customs house. Pictures of the Customs House usually only ever depict two parts of it: either the imposing granite facade or this elegant main staircase inside.

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Interior of the Customs House

I'm pretty sure Redford shot the party scene inside the Andrew Low House. It's been a long time since I toured it, so it's not that familiar to me. However, I remember a friend of mine, an old lady named Pat, talking about the crew being there and shooting something and leaving a scratch on a wall or something. Pat is a member of the Colonial Dames of America and they own the house. It's their Georgia state headquarters.

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Party inside the Andrew Low House (I think)

I snuck this little screen grab in here because the distinctive oriel window of the Green-Meldrim House is visible behind James McAvoy during this very brief scene, the house's only appearance in the movie as far as I know. I don't know of the Green-Meldrim showing up in any other movies at all- a wasted opportunity if you ask me. It's an extremely ornate Gothic Revival mansion, just crying out to be the setting for somebody's old-fashioned haunted house movie.  

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James MacAvoy inside the Green-Meldrim House

Here's a nighttime photograph of the exterior I took myself a couple years ago. Look at it! Doesn't it look like Vincent Price lives there? Doesn't it look beautiful and mysterious and a little bit menacing all at the same time, like you can't resist coming close even though you're not certain you'll ever make it out again? I've toured the house; it looks like that on the inside too. A silent man with scissors for hands would seem as if he belonged there.

For no mere mortal can resist....

The following shot is one of the ramps leading down to River Street, though I'll be damned if I can work out precisely which one. But I really put it here so I could talk about the look of the movie. This scene reminds me very much of those few silent minutes in Mary Poppins when Mr. Banks knows his career at the bank is ruined and he walks through dark, still London streets to confront his fate. This looks exactly like that. Many good movies have been made in Savannah, perhaps even a handful of great movies, but I haven't seen one yet that I enjoyed looking at as much as The Conspirator. Despite its staunch commitment to historical accuracy, or maybe as a counterbalance to the weighty and sometimes dry material, the movie looks like a fairytale. It's beautiful and I love it. I don't know what process Newton Thomas Sigel used, but bless his little heart for it. Everything is just a little bit hazy and a little bit soft. Like a memory.

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A ramp leading down to River Street

This here is just a tiny bit of space between the Green-Meldrim House and St. John's Episcopal Church. McAvoy's character strolls along here with Mary Surratt's priest. The church owns the Green-Meldrim and connected the two buildings with this Gothic-arch walkway years ago.

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Arches and courtyard between the Green-Meldrim House and St. John's Episcopal Church

My last location image is of that very same block of houses that appeared in the movie Savannah, which I have previously written about. James McAvoy comes flying up the stairs and banging on the door to beg the judge for a stay on Mary Surratt's execution. The judge, by the way, is played John Cullum. I have a soft spot for him and it pleases me to see him here. I don't know what it is about this little stretch of Perry Street between Bull and Whitaker that every movie maker is so in love with, but there's something about it that really works.

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Everything happens on Perry Street for some reason

One of the Georgia legislature's stipulations for movies that accept the tax credits here is they must include our colorful peach logo in the end credits. So, be on the lookout for this little guy any time you head to the theater because Georgia is on fire lately. Everybody wants a piece of this sweet, fuzzy, Peach State action. They are making movies here faster than I can write about them.

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I stuck this in just so you'd have a complete list of all the locations used in the film.

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So there you have The Conspirator. History enthusiasts will probably love it and cheer The American Film Company's refusal to clutter up the narrative with unnecessary fictionalized drama. For that same reason, the movie may not appeal to a broader audience. Movies typically follow certain formulas because the truth is those formulas have proven again and again that they can keep even the least attentive audience members engaged. What I'm saying is The Conspirator is for people who can handle a serious and mature movie going experience, but not so much for the casual viewer who just wants to be entertained. Despite its shortcomings, I count it among the better quality movies to have been filmed here.

Addendum to "10 Careless Lies...."

There are a couple of points I need to review (because I have no problem correcting myself or clarifying a muddy issue).

The city of Savannah's name

Further discussion on Facebook with my fellow tour guides reveals the origins of the name "Savannah" to be very murky indeed. The word savanna is one the Spanish may have picked up from the Taíno Indians in the Caribbean, then fed back to other Indians on the North American mainland. That is, perhaps, how it was acquired by the migrating Shawnee who drove out the Westo tribe and made their home along the Savannah River. They might have referred to themselves or the landscape as "Savannah" or it may be the South Carolinians just couldn't pronounce their tribe name correctly and it came out sounding like "Savannah" whenever English people said it. There is another possibility: that savannah was an Algonquian word already in use among area tribes and completely unrelated to savanna, but they just happened to sound the same. Basically, although we know where our current usage of the word savanna came from, it's up for debate where the name of the Savannah River originated.

I still feel better attributing the name of the city to the river than to any characteristics of the surrounding landscape. No matter how you tell it, it was still a group of Indians who applied the name to the river and it just seems most reasonable that's what made James Oglethorpe pick it for the city. The river was already well-known, as evidenced by its specific designation as our northern boundary in the text of Georgia's original charter, which you can read here. Beware, old-timey folk had not yet been introduced to the virtue of paragraph breaks, periods, or our modern spelling conventions. It's sort of a word quagmire, is what I'm saying.

My colleague James Caskey, owner of Cobblestone Tours, did hand me a laugh when he reminded me of another silly myth about the origin of Savannah's name:

"During the boat's journey up the river, someone bumped the captain's daughter, Anna, right over the side. As she flailed around in the water, her father desperately shouted, 'Somebody save Anna!' So, that became the first city's name."

I hadn't heard that one in a long time and had completely forgotten about it! Surely no one has ever related this tall tale without a wink and a nod? I mean, it's cute as a joke, but not even the dumbest tour guide could mistake it for fact... right?

Sherman in Savannah and Juliette Gordon Low's family

I got a little blowback on this in the comments on my last post. In fact, I originally wrote an entire paragraph about the supposed connection between William Sherman and the Gordon family because I heard someone say once that Nellie Kinzie Gordon (Juliette Gordon Low's mother) was Sherman's rumored mistress. I cut that part because my last entry was already sprawling over 5,000 words and I felt it didn't count as a common myth since I only ever heard it one time. Guess I should have followed my instinct.

Anyhow, Nellie Kinzie Gordon was not Sherman's mistress. It is true her house was one of the first he visited after he marched into Savannah. What for? Well, Sherman dropped in on all the local bigwigs; doesn't mean he was sleeping with them. He had to touch base with the folk who were going to be putting the city back in order after he left. Nellie probably seemed like a good ice breaker. She had married one of the most prominent men in Georgia (who was at that moment serving in the Confederate army and whom she adored), but was herself a Yankee. I've never read anything to indicate she and Sherman knew each other personally before the war, but I'm sure he knew of her family. They were both Midwesterners- she from Chicago, he from Ohio. Her family were among the pioneers who founded Chicago, so I think it's fair to say they were prominent people. Nellie had very elite connections all through the Federal government and several relatives serving in the Union army, so she and Sherman undoubtedly had some acquaintances in common. She was the most likely person to help him start a dialogue with a freshly defeated, resentful Southern aristocracy.

And what was Nellie going to do? Slam her door on the red-headed juggernaut who had just "made Georgia howl" from here to Atlanta? Nope. She smiled politely and invited him inside to play with her little daughters, Eleanor, Juliette, and Alice, while she began wheeling the deals that would keep her family in one piece and ensure her husband still had a career when he came home. Nellie was so much more interesting than a mere mistress. To imply sex was all she had to work with is worse than sleazy, it's boring. Y'all know women, even 19th century women, are capable of actual negotiations, don't you? I recommend this book for a thorough and entertaining overview of the Gordon family. I know Juliette is on the cover, but half the book goes to Nellie!

So, I hope that clears up those two points. Keep reading and don't forget to call me up for a tour if you're ever visiting Savannah!

Edit

Thanks to Tim at Dash Tours for providing more details on Nellie's connection to Sherman.

"Sherman was a friend of Eleanor's father and had known her during her childhood. He was dropping off letters from Eleanor's brother, who was in the Union Army. Sherman had lost his infant son while marching through Georgia and didn't find out until he reached Savannah. He and General Howard visited the Gordons often during their stay, mostly to play with the children."

I knew Sherman and Howard enjoyed playing with the children and that Sherman had just lost his son. I probably read about him meeting little Nellie and carrying letters from her brother and then forgot all about it. Basically, Nellie and Sherman ran in the same circles and elite people occupy very small exclusive circles. That's why they all know each other. The important thing is, Sherman kinda having a previous acquaintance with Nellie Kinzie Gordon ≠ Nellie being his mistress.

10 Careless Lies Told by Careless Guides

Oooh, shots fired! Pow! Pow! Everything I do, I do out of love. I want the tourism industry in this city to meet world-class standards. At the moment, it's still a scantily regulated hodgepodge of large, distantly owned corporations (i.e. Old Town Trolley) and variously qualified small operators. This leads to very uneven experiences for tourists who visit Savannah and may make them leery of ever coming back, especially if they sense they're being lied to for the sake of someone's bottom line. I don't mean to hate on my fellow tour guides and make them look bad. Most of them are perfectly nice people who do not spread incorrect information out of malice. It's just that the majority of tour guides in this town are regular 'ole employees working for a larger company. They get paid by the hour or by the tour. They are paid to show people a good time; they are not paid to do extra research during their off hours. Company owners or managers should be the ones putting forth that effort and conveying the information to their staff, but, well... management, you know?

As a result of this lackadaisical concern for accuracy, patent untruths sometimes seep into the tourism cannon and can circulate for years like a dead goldfish in the toilet bowl. So, here is a list of ten such casual lies I hate the most, arranged in order from mildly annoying to egregiously stupid.

1. Chiggers (red bugs) live in Spanish moss

Yeah, it's a small inaccuracy and a minor peeve, but it bothers me because there's no reason to tell people the wrong thing when it's just as easy to tell people the right thing. Chiggers are rotten little monsters that will make you itch like hell (speaking from experience here), but blaming their presence on Spanish moss is an unfair libel against a picturesque and harmless plant. These tiny red devils lurk near the ground in grass and under low vegetation. I got eaten up by them when I was very young just from screwing around in some woods and tromping through pine straw. No doubt they turn up in Spanish moss that's been lying on the dirt long enough, but chiggers would never find their way to moss that is still hanging high up in the trees. Please don't interpret this to mean I'm giving you the all-clear to yank moss from the nearest branch and go prancing around with it. There is a species of jumping spider that lives only in Spanish moss....

2. The city was named for the surrounding landscape, i.e. Savannah = savanna

This one is an understandable confusion. After all, it's been making the rounds since at least the 19th century. I don't fault any tour guide who repeats it, but I would like to see this detail corrected. The idea is that our first settlers from England looked out over the Georgia coast, saw the tall smooth cord-grass waving over the vast salt marsh, and named the city for the grassy African plains they thought the landscape resembled.

It sounds good for a minute, but makes less and less sense the more you think about it. A bunch of white English dudes named the first city in their new colony after a geographical feature of the African continent? You know, that continent they had already been plundering for two centuries and which they had no reason to love? And had any Europeans actually made it as far as the savanna at this point (the 18th century)? Weren't they still mostly scooting around the coast and hiring other Africans to traipse around the interior for them? On top of that, I'm pretty sure the first people here, especially our founder James Oglethorpe, were not completely stupid. Surely Oglethorpe was capable of telling the difference between a treeless grassy plain and a muddy salt marsh. I mean, the boat sailed right through it. He got a close look. What slams the final nail in place on this one, though, is the fact Savannah was never a treeless grassy plain. There's even a picture to prove it!

Savannah, GA, 1734, Peter Gordon, Bonnie Blue Tours

This drawing of Savannah was done in 1734 and given to the Trustees of Georgia as a gift. Also a gift to historians, as it turns out. This is how we know what the city looked like early on. Oglethorpe found a high bluff overlooking the river and decided it would be the perfect place for his new city. How convenient the bluff was covered in pine trees the colonists could use to build their first little homes. In fact, the whole area was thickly forested in old growth pine. It was a forest.

Hm, so why did Oglethorpe name this place Savannah? According to Savannah in the Old South, which is a favorite resource of mine and one I re-read every few years, the name was already there. It was the river. And the river got its name from the Indians. Various Indians had been living along the Georgia coast for thousands of years and had given the river various names. In the 17th century, a tribe called the Westos dominated this territory and named the river after themselves, so it was the Westos River. English settlers over in South Carolina did not like the Westos very much because the Westos wouldn't trade with them. So, South Carolina sidled up to a competing tribe, the Savannahs, and traded them guns 'n ammo (the actual stuff... not the magazine...). The Savannahs cheerfully drove out the Westos, set up trade with South Carolina, established Savannah Town on what is now Beech Island, SC, and renamed the river for their own tribe. Although those Indians and their settlement were gone by the time Oglethorpe and the Georgia colonists arrived here in 1733, the river still had that name. I guess Oglethorpe thought "Savannah" sounded pretty and maybe figured it would reduce confusion about the city's location if he just named it after a river that was already well known. Lucky break, I say, or we might be living in the historic city of Oglethorpia right now.

3. Savannah's Waving Girl spent her life waiting for a lover who sailed away and never returned

savannah, ga, bonnie blue tours, waving girl statue, morel park, savannah river, river street

Ok, this one gets especially creepy when you consider she began this tradition as a child. Sucks the romance right out of the whole scenario, doesn't it?

Florence Martus was the Waving Girl's real name and she was born to a local lighthouse keeper in 1869. Her father originally tended the Cockspur Island Lighthouse, but then the family moved to Elba Island and that's where Florence spent most of her life. You can see Elba Island if you look east down River Street. It's easy to spot for the large, light blue liquid natural gas (LNG) tanks squatting on it.

Savannah, GA, Bonnie Blue Tours, Elba Island, LNG

Florence developed the habit of running down to the shore and waving her handkerchief to sailors on ships coming and going from the port. Being a sailor in the 19th century was such a demanding, underpaid, suck-tacular job, ships' captains regularly had to kidnap men to make them do it. So, you can imagine how much it must have warmed the hearts of these bedraggled men to see this fresh-faced girl offering such a sweet welcome. Naturally, the sailors waved back. Florence upped her game after a while and began greeting ships at night too by waving a lantern back and forth. Now, no one likes to tell stories more than sailors, 'cept maybe fishermen, so tales about this waving girl at the port of Savannah spread far and wide (acquiring many invented details along the way) and sailors from all over the world would look for her and wave back. Florence never married and remained on the island until she was too old to live on her own anymore. She died in 1943, having greeted more ships and sailors in her lifetime than anyone can even count. The city erected her statue in Morel Park many years ago to continue her welcoming tradition.

Why did Florence Martus remain unmarried and wave at ships decade after decade if a failed romance wasn't the reason? The truth can be very frustrating sometimes, especially when the truth is that we simply don't know. The romantic legends do make for really good storytelling and it's no surprise any tour guide would prefer to tell it that way. Honestly, I know many a tourist would prefer to hear it that way. It's so much more satisfying than "Just because." And the truth becomes even more unattractive when evidence points to the likelihood Florence had some sort of compulsive disorder and waving at every passing ship was how she expressed it. Sorry guys, but that's the way it is. And that's the way I tell it on my tours whenever the subject comes up.

I do not feel it diminishes The Waving Girl as a cherished local legend, however. The fact she has a statue makes it clear enough her actions transcended disappointing reality and made her into a symbol. Florence Martus is not important because of Florence Martus, but because of the imprint she left on the international seafaring community. She was the first greeting for countless men who sailed here and the last memory many of them took from here. I'll take that over a clichéd old romance any day.

4. Mary Telfair never married because of a thwarted romance

Savannah, GA, Bonnie Blue Tours, Mary Telfair

Ugh, why is it both literary and historical tradition simply do not know what to make of a single woman? Some versions of this story say Mary soured on romance forever after being dumped by such-and-such suitor, some say she and her sister Margaret fell in love with the same man and he chose Margaret over her. Why does it always have to be a lost love or a jilted romance or some tired old canard like that? This one gets on my nerves in particular because it dismisses the deliberate and perfectly self-aware decision-making process of a very, very intelligent woman whose impact on Savannah was vast and valuable and should not be ignored in favor of trite gossip.

She never took a husband because she simply never found one she wanted. It's true Mary Telfair didn't have much to offer in the looks department, but she was very intelligent, well traveled, well connected, highly educated, and fabulously rich- qualities that surely piqued the interest of many an upwardly mobile gentleman looking to make an advantageous match. But the self-possessed and headstrong Mary Telfair did not fancy being anybody's meal ticket or societal stepping stone and likely never encountered a man she believed had nobler intentions. Also, her standards for people in general were set maybe a little too high.

As for the man she and her sister allegedly both fell for, that would be William Hodgson. Mary and Margaret encountered him while vacationing in Europe and there was never any question which sister he was going to end up with. Hodgson completely flipped out for Margaret. He wrote her steamy letters nonstop between the time they got engaged and the time they got married and gave up a juicy appointment to a consular post in Turkey because Margaret didn't want to live there. This internationally lauded diplomat and preternaturally gifted linguist gave up his career to live in stupid old Savannah because he loved Margaret so much. It puzzles me a little. I mean, Margaret had all the same advantages as Mary (also the same lack of visual appeal), but was four years older than William and already 45 years old when they got married. Maybe he had a fondness for mature ladies and didn't want any kids? Was he blown away by her mental acuity? Did he just fall head over heels for no real reason in truly classic style? I think if there is a deep romantic story to be told here, it's probably William Hodgson's and not any of the Telfairs'. At any rate, there is no reason to believe Mary ever carried a torch for the guy. She stayed single because she liked it that way. Plenty of modern women should be able to relate.

5. General Sherman did not burn Savannah during the Civil War because he thought the city was so beautiful/ because he had a mistress here

Oh, please. This one's easy to poke holes in. We can dismiss the first point because Sherman burnt or ransacked plenty of attractive places during his March to the Sea. Beauty was not going to slow this beast down. Also, Savannah did not look as good then as it does now. Go check out some old-timey photographs, you'll see I'm right. The second assertion, about the mistress, also wobbles under closer scrutiny. Sherman spent a little bit of time in Florida and Georgia when he was stationed down south during the Seminole Wars, but that's about it. After that, he got married and had a career that sent him zooming between Washington DC, California, Indiana, and New York. None of those places are even close to Savannah, so when was he supposed to digress down here to keep his mystery lady satisfied?

Well then, why didn't Sherman burn Savannah down when he got here? It's pretty straightforward, really. He had no reason to do so and lots of reasons not to. The 9,000 or so Confederate soldiers who had been in the area skedaddled the night before Sherman's arrival. The general in charge of that maneuver, William Hardee, knew he'd never stand a chance against 60,000 Union soldiers and decided the wiser strategy would be to take off and leave Savannah the opportunity to surrender and perhaps escape destruction. It worked. Savannah offered no military resistance, surrendered politely, and Sherman was glad to hunker down here for a while. It was in his best interest to keep the city intact, especially the port. He needed to get Union boats up the river to resupply his men and deliver the mail. His army needed a break too. They had just marched nonstop for six weeks to get here from Atlanta and the last of that was through pine barrens where there were precious few farms to raid for supplies. They were low on everything and desperately tired, despite being triumphant conquerors of Georgia. On top of all that, it was cold. The soldiers got here just before Christmas and left at the beginning of February, so that means they waited out the worst part of winter before moving on. That's it. We were more useful as a pit stop than as... a pit, I guess.

6. Gangsters shot up people in front of the Lucas Theatre in 1928

The Lucas is a movie palace built in 1921 and operates today as a movie theater and venue for live performances. It's right next to Reynolds Square, a square which serves as the starting point for many different ghost tours. So, it's no surprise ghost guides keep passing this story from one to another like a cold sore. So many tour groups walk down this block and they need something to fill the space. To make it more compelling, there are some suspicious looking, smudgy little holes in the tile on the front of the building. Oooh, bullet holes? And Savannah played a major role in the rum running trade during Prohibition and there were loads of illegal stills hidden away back in the sticks. Gangster shoot outs are totally believable! It's just too good to be true! Yep. That's the problem. I'll let my colleague James Caskey handle this one, from his book Haunted Savannah:

The first problem with this story is that the shooting never happened. [...] An exhaustive search of the archives at the Georgia Historical Society reveals not one bit of supporting evidence.... [...] the black marks pointed to by tour guides are decidedly not caused by .45 caliber bullets. A round from a Thompson machine gun would have almost certainly shattered the Spanish style tile [...].

Thanks, James!

I do ghost tours and I understand the need for, um, stretching the truth sometimes. We must keep our skills sharp in the ancient Southern art of exaggeration-fu. I'm also pretty sure people expect to be BSd just a little bit on a ghost tour. I mean, come on, you're already on a tour where people tell ghost stories. But I personally draw the line at details or stories that don't jive with what I know of actual history. It just... it feels less like good storytelling and more like telling a lie to make a buck. And I don't like it when I see other tour guides doing that. To be fair, though, I'm sure many who tell this story picked it up from the coworkers who trained them and have no idea it isn't true (see my earlier point about quality control being management's job).

I've been pretty understanding so far, but that's enough of that. The last four entries on this list are the idiotic falsehoods I hate most. Their details splatter against the windshield of common sense like verbal bird poop. They strain the available supply of synonyms for the word "stupid". They make me want to set things (mostly other tour guides) on fire with the power of my white-hot rage. They make Savannah's entire tourism industry look bad. I give no quarter to any tour guide who continues disseminating the following infuriating and clearly untrue yarns. Those who do are basically the Typhoid Marys of storytelling and should be quarantined on Hutchinson Island where they can forever stare forlornly back at the city they maligned with their unforgivable disregard for truth and basic logic.

7. Something about slaughtering pigs (or possibly people) inWright Square

I won't name names or point fingers at any particular company, but I've heard this one up close and in detail. It's been a long time, so the story's gotten fuzzy on me. I know it was still making the rounds on the ghost tours a couple years ago, but I'm not sure it still is. Anyway, if a guide tries to tell you anything about feral hogs being chased out of the woods surrounding colonial Savannah and into a pit in Wright Square where they were then barbequed alive and devoured by voracious English settlers, just kick that guide right in the knee, snatch your money back out of their pocket, and go spend it on booze or something. Even when Budweiser pretends to be beer it isn't lying that boldly.

There's a variant on this involving strangers in the city being barbequed and cannibalized. Both versions of this story hit me right out of nowhere when I first heard them years ago. I have no idea where they came from, since there is absolutely no physical feature in any of the squares that would suggest such nonsense and nothing I can think of in the city's history that may have been distorted into this macabre and stupid legend. This. Never. Happened.

8. Our lovely (and expensive) Jones Street is the origin of the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses"

I kind of just want to type a frowny face here and walk away. I know for a fact tour guides out there are still selling this little pork pie to people and I don't understand how they can say it with a straight face. Doesn't it just strain credulity? And sound dumb? Really, really dumb? Also, twenty seconds on Google is all it takes to deflate this myth: Keeping Up with the Joneses was the title of a popular early 20th century comic strip. And no, the guy who wrote that comic strip had never been anywhere near Savannah. I would never spout off this brain dead drivel to a group of tourists for fear someone's smartypants kid would whip out their iPhone, look it up, and prove me wrong on the spot. I can't believe the guides who keep saying it aren't struck by how unlikely it sounds. I can't believe none of them have been shown up by teenagers with phones.

9. People used to stuff their mattresses with Spanish moss, would get eaten up by the chiggers that lived in it, and that's the origin of the saying "Don't let the bedbugs bite"

This is another one that makes me sigh and knot my brow in exasperation. It bothers me not merely because it is factually untrue, but because you don't even have to know the facts to know this doesn't make the tiniest iota of sense. Any tour guide who tells this to a group of tourists is openly insulting their intelligence.

We've already gone over the matter of chiggers in Spanish moss. I could stop there, but I'm not going to because chiggers ≠ bedbugs. Just because "redbug" rhymes with "bedbug" does not mean you can use the words interchangeably. These are two completely different insects. Actually, chiggers aren't even insects, they're classed as arachnids. The last thing these two creatures have in common is their Phylum! The ease with which one can ascertain these two bugs are, indeed, two different bugs is not the only thing about this story that drives me nuts. Even if someone on a tour did not know that chiggers do not live in Spanish moss and even if they did not know for sure that bedbugs have no relation to chiggers, they might dimly perceive the specious nature of this tale due to a vague recollection that bedbugs are, well, everywhere, including places where Spanish moss is not to be found. That includes the Old World before the discovery of the New World (where the offending plant is native).

Why, why do people keep repeating such obviously half-baked and easy to disprove tripe? I expect a lazy person not to bother correcting a mistaken story, but someone had to exert themselves to get this one wrong in the first place. It makes so little sense, I feel sure the guides who tell it must be consciously suppressing their own critical thinking skills in order to force the words out of their mouths. You don't have to, my compatriots. I'm setting you free from this lunacy right now.

Aside from all the inconsistencies regarding the bugs themselves, this legend also rests on the assumption- which seems to be the basis for many historical myths- that our ancestors were dumber than my cat when he gets his head stuck in a jar. Yes, they did use the soft, springy Spanish moss to stuff their mattresses and cushions. In fact, people used to do all kinds of neato peato stuff with Spanish moss which you can read more about here and here. But do you think they were so stupid they didn't know there were critters living in it? They had ways of curing and ginning the stuff to make it usable, people. There may have been regular 'ole bedbugs crawling around in their mossy mattresses (because those things were impossible to get rid of until people started bathing in DDT), but no one at the time ever mistook them for redbugs. And there is no reason we should be making that mistake now.

By the way, you may have noticed a theme appearing here. Any time a tour guide tells you thingamajig in Savannah is the origin of blah-blah world wide colloquialism... just assume it's bullcrap. We've never been such a major player on the international stage that our quaint habits are rewriting the English language.

10. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1876, doctors tried to hide the scale of the disaster by sneaking corpses out of Candler Hospital via secret tunnels and burying them at night in Laurel Grove Cemetery (or possibly Forsyth Park)

All I can do here is raise one eyebrow disdainfully and ask, "Really, ghost tours?"

How is that supposed to have worked, pray tell? In the middle of an epidemic, someone had time to dig tunnels from the old Candler Hospital to Laurel Grove Cemetery a mile away? Without anyone in town noticing? The current hospital building was only completed in 1876. They must have added those long tunnels really fast to be ready for that epidemic! Wouldn't it have been faster, easier, and just as discreet to catapult the bodies across town from the roof of the hospital? Would have been a hell of a lot more fun than lugging putrid corpses around under the city, I tell you what. Why haul them all the way to the cemetery at all? You got this mile-long tunnel handy; just stuff 'em in there, it's the same thing! Now, burying people in Forsyth Park is a pretty nifty alternative except mass graves suddenly appearing in the middle of a large, popular public park would probably blow your cover.

Eeeeuuuuuurrrgh. This trash makes me want to punch all of the faces. Aside from the practical impossibilities, the story of the Candler Hospital tunnels relies on two other fallacious assumptions. 1: Again, all of our ancestors were morons. 19th century Savannahians couldn't count, I guess? Or they were really distractible and kept forgetting how many of their friends and relatives had died? Or they just forgot from year to year that every summer was Yellow Fever Season and someone was for sure going to die? Did people used to interact on the Schrödinger's Cat principle and assume anyone they couldn't see was both alive and dead at the the same time? 'Cuz that's the only logic I can come up with for trying to sneak away the bodies of folks everyone already knew were dead. 2: Overestimating the severity of the epidemic and the degree of panic. As noted before, every summer was Yellow Fever Season and Savannah had 3 major outbreaks under its belt (1796, 1820, 1854) by the time our last big one rolled around in 1876. That's at least one brush with deadly disease per generation. Not to say people were used to it or it wasn't scary for them, but it doesn't qualify as a surprise. And although the yellow fever of 1876 killed the most people in terms of sheer numbers (more than 1,000), it was far less severe than previous epidemics when you consider the mortality rate as a percentage of the total population. So, I know people were freaked out, but they dealt with it.

This logistically insulting, aggravatingly persistent ghost story is a sleazy way to exploit fascination with the very real hospital tunnels that once served a morbid, yet perfectly ordinary purpose. They were morgue tunnels. Just passageways built to connect the main building to the new morgue, all of which were upgrades made to the old 1819 structure in 1876. People die in a hospital and the bodies have to go somewhere and how are you going to keep them cool and prevent rot before the advent of refrigeration? You build your morgue underground, of course. It was a world class facility, in fact, and was even written about and touted in medical journals of the time. Nothing secret or shady about it!

Blatant lies like this, as well as the other fibs and falsehoods I've listed, dismay me badly. It's rude to the people who pay you money in exchange for the truth, first of all. It's also unfair to get paid for work (research) you haven't actually done or that you don't have the skills to interpret usefully. People can often sense when they're being lied to even if they can't tell precisely what's wrong, and having that experience while in Savannah is likely to leave tourists with a bitter taste in their mouths. It will discourage people from coming back to the city if they think every tour company is run by a con man or every guide they meet is some joker who doesn't take their job seriously.

It's a problem I think the City needs to tackle by becoming more active in the licensing process. Right now it's pretty much "take a test, pay some money" and poof! you're a tour guide. Comparably historic cities like New Orleans and Charleston have much more stringent licensing requirements and way more comprehensive tour guide manuals. I think it would be great and would improve the overall caliber of the tourism industry here if the process required prospective guides to enroll in a semester-long course that goes over the material in depth. The time commitment would weed out fly-by-nights and a structured class would promote better retention of the facts and ensure a high baseline of knowledge among employees across all types of tour companies. My hope is that it would also foster respect for History as a discipline. A high-quality work force is most likely to attract high-quality tourists to this area and those are the kind I prefer.

But until the City of Savannah calls me up and asks for my opinion on the matter, the next best thing I can do is empower you, dear tourist, with my knowledge. Now you know the commonest untruths to beware of while you're in town. Use this power wisely. Together we can smack down the jokers!

A good tour is a great high

Boy, I was buzzing for days after the tour I gave on May 10th. It's dorky to admit you love what you do unless what you do is something super cool like working for the Mythbusters, or something beyond comprehension like being Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But I'm here to tell you my name is Bonnie and I love being a tour  guide. If only there were a support group for me! But I do love it! It's not just a matter of showing off my city, either. A good tour is also a good performance, and that satisfies the actor in me. There is a reason almost every actor in this city works as a tour guide at least once in their lives, if only for a season. Not many of them make a career out of it like me, but they all get licensed and put a few tourist dollars in their pockets.

I'm running these public tours now Thursday-Sunday, which can be booked in advance on Zerve.com. I've got a morning history tour, an evening ghost tour, and I recently created a drinking tour that I am very proud of. I call it "Lightly Sauced- Raise a Glass to History". The title is pretty spiffy too, if I do say so myself. Now, I hate drunk people and I hate pub crawls. Some tour guides have a gift for conducting pub crawls and really enjoy doing them, but I am not that tour guide. "Lightly Sauced" is not a pub crawl. It is a real history tour, just with a little something extra. My idea was to do a really classy drinking tour that doesn't have the goal of getting everybody drunk. Instead of running around with a crowd of noisy inebriates, the group size is limited (all of three of the tours have limited sizes) and the ticket price covers the cost of all the drinks, food, and tips for the wait staff. As I was putting the whole thing together, I came up with the notion of featuring drinks that have some kind of historical connection to Savannah or at least the Old South.

That wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I knew I wanted samples of Madeira wine because Madeira was a big deal here back in the 19th century. The Davenport House Museum does a special presentation every February called Potable Gold: Savannah's Madeira Tradition. Now I kinda wish I'd gone to it. Guess I'll have to wait until next year. Surprisingly, the only restaurant I could find that served Madeira was Jazz'd Tapas Bar. Good thing it's a nice place. And since small plates are what they do, it gave me the genius idea of including a snack everyone on the tour could share. The start time is 4:30 and it runs 3 hours; that's well after lunch and a little before dinner. I didn't want everyone staggering around on an empty stomach! Brian, manager of Jazz'd, was spooky like a horse about working with me. I had to reassure him I wasn't a fly-by-night tour poacher (yes, those exist), bound to screw him over either through malice or incompetence. It takes finesse to work all the numbers so the ticket price covers all the costs while also making some money for me. Then there's the logistics of making sure all the restaurateurs get paid and the servers get tipped. I simplified that by opening up a new credit card expressly for this tour so everyone gets paid as I go.

My next thought was to check out the mead bar at Savannah Bee Company. Mead doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this city's history, so that one's kind of a wild card. I just really like Savannah Bee and their manager (also a local singer), Danielle Hicks, was just so enthusiastic about participating. Plus, how often does anybody get to do a mead tasting?

Mint juleps seemed like the next logical inclusion. Ask anyone to name a Southern cocktail and 99% will say "mint julep" first. So, no connection to Savannah, exactly, but decidedly Southern. And I think Margaret Mitchell says something in Gone With the Wind about Scarlet O'Hara drinking a mint julep, and that book is set in Georgia, so that's close enough for me. I was surprised again to find that almost no one in the Historic District serves mint juleps! Some people have told me it's because they're complex and time-consuming to make, so bar tenders don't like them. Understandable, I guess, but a little disappointing. The bar at the 17Hundred90 Inn and Restaurant was my only option, so I'm lucky it's a nice place and the location fell perfectly in line with where I wanted to go.

Lastly, I knew from the beginning I had to include Chatham Artillery Punch. It's the only drink on the list that was actually invented in Savannah and it's a classic. It's also got, like, 6 different liquors in it, so a good one to end on. Wouldn't want to start off that way, right? There are at least 3 restaurants downtown serving this drink, but 2 of them are on River Street and I didn't want to veer that far off-course. It would also be mean to make people navigate the stairs after loading them up with wine, mead, and a cocktail. By process of elimination, then, the bar at The Pirates' House would have to be my final stop. (As an aside- am I a weirdo for being unduly pleased by the restaurant's bold use the plural-possessive in its name and correct placement of the attendant apostrophe? Is that just me?)

So everything worked out quite nicely! I was able to feature the drinks I wanted and all the stops lined up conveniently from west to east, starting near City Market and ending at The Pirates' House. All I had left to do was run a test to check for bugs.

That's where my May 10th tour came in. Some (delightful, wonderful, very helpful) friends joined me at 4:30 in Telfair Square. I was afraid no one would come because my invitation got basically no response, probably because all my friends are poor and I needed a little money from people to pay for the libations. But John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina came to my rescue! Hooray! We had such a great time and I got some very helpful feedback. Here are some pictures I took along the way. Sorry for the crummy iPhone camera quality:

Raise your glasses, guys! And here's a close-up of the Madeira with Jazz'd's (oh God, too many apostrophes now) delicious Baked Cheese Terra Cotta plate:

The mead at Savannah Bee was much appreciated and I found out it was the first time John and Brenda had ever been in the store. They'd been walking past it for years and just hadn't gotten around to shopping there. It is a shame not to shop at Savannah Bee!

Here is our bartender hard at work crushing the mint for the juleps at the 17Hundred90. He's told me his name on two different occasions and I am ashamed to have forgotten it both times.

I was a little nervous because John is something of a mint julep connoisseur. He makes his own each year for the Kentucky Derby. What would I do if he told me the drink was lousy? I couldn't get it anywhere else, but I wouldn't want tourists to drink crappy liquor. Happily, John informed me the mint julep met his standard. These drinks all have Bonnie's Friends Seal of Approval. That was my other motivation for the test-run: I needed people who regularly drink alcohol to vet the booze for me. I hate the taste of alcohol and I don't drink, so I have no basis for comparison. I overcame my lack of qualification for this tour by delegating the tasting responsibility to my willing guinea pigs.

So, last stop was The Pirates' House and that was a trip! Our bartender was the a woman named Avery, the self-appointed all-mighty Keeper of the Punch. Seriously, she will cut you if you screw with her Chatham Artillery Punch.

Avery likes her job. She likes her job a lot. And by the time John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina got to the bar, they liked her job a lot too. I checked in with the group and they all assured me they were not drunk (isn't that what drunk people always say?), but very pleasantly buzzed. I hung around for a while until I had to get set for a ghost tour and polled everyone for feedback about their experience. The one significant change I made, at my friends' insistence, was increasing the duration from 2 1/2 to 3 hours. I agreed with them it would set a better pace. If you do the tour and you think it's too long, you can blame my buddies. It's their fault. They really lobbied hard for the longer run time.

So if you want to have as much fun as John, Brenda, Christa, and Tina while staying mostly (or moderately) sober and learning some stuff about Savannah, or if you want to impress your friends and family by scheduling a really special experience for them, come with me and get "lightly sauced"!

Savannah Scenes # 3: Savannah

Ok, I've really got to pick up the pace on this project now because I'm developing a backlog of movies. The library had The Conspirator ready for me sooner than I expected, Netflix got CBGB here faster than I expected, and I still haven't watched my friend Nathanael's copy of Forces of Nature after holding it hostage for 3 months. (Sorry, Nathanael!) Now I've got plans to watch CBGB on Tuesday with my movie-and-punk-music aficionado friend, Jim. If I don't tear through this review of Savannah now, I'll start getting details mixed up, like thinking Joey Ramone was a duck hunter or something. ...God, that's a fabulous image. Savannah was filmed here in 2011 by Unclaimed Freight Productions, a very busy local studio which is also responsible for the afore-mentioned CBGB and a soon-to-be-made Gregg Allman biopic. It's based on a book called Ward Allen: Savannah Market Hunter, by Jack Cay. It's the true story of Ward Allen, a local aristocrat born and raised for the genteel lifestyle who told everyone to suck his decoys and became a duck hunter instead. He continually battled local bureaucracy for his right and the rights of other hunters to shoot and hunt along the Savannah River and sell their haul to local hotels and other businesses. Oh, and his best buddy was a black guy. In the Jim Crow south. If you're interested, here are a couple of Savannah Morning News articles about the movie, one from February 2011 and the other after a screening in March of 2012.

I remember when they were filming this three years ago. I think every actor and extra in town was involved one way or another. I have to hand it to Unclaimed Freight- they pulled in some A-list talent for this low-budget flick about a guy hardly anyone in Savannah, and no one outside of Savannah, has ever heard of. Jim Caviezel (Jesus himself!) played Ward Allen. Jaimie Alexander, now famous for playing Sif in the Thor movies, portrayed his wife Lucy. I think the frosting on this celebrity cake, though, is Chiwetel Ejiofor. He plays Ward Allen's hunting buddy Christmas Moultrie. Probably not a lot of people knew (or could pronounce) his name in 2011. But now that Ejiofor is bound to be carried out of the Academy Awards under a pile of glittering Oscars for his work in 12 Years a Slave, we can all be retroactively proud that he made a movie here first. There was also Hal Holbrook, looking like he had a great time playing a sympathetic judge. Holbrook, of course, is better than A-list- he's legendary.

So, how do I think this low-budget period piece fared? And did it make good use of our fair city? Um... well... it certainly had its good points and its... not so good points. Let's rip off the band-aid and go straight to one thing that did NOT work:

Oh, hey, an unexpected bonus: I learned that if I use the PrintScreen function while watching a movie on this computer, it will automatically save a screen capture to the Dropbox folder! Anyway, back to the point I intended to make here. OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT? Movie making and theatre are both very dependent on illusion. You, Unclaimed Freight, were trying to create the illusion of a luxurious and well-funded period piece. While I admire your ambition and your general ingenuity on display throughout the film, this is a moment that makes your limits painfully, terrifyingly obvious. When the only old man makeup you can afford comes out of a jar labelled "Uncanny Valley Nightmare Cream," you should have the good sense to avoid close ups. Shoot him from behind or in silhouette or hire an actual old guy to stand in for Chiwetel Ejiofor, anything but this!

Ok, now that's out of the way, let's move on to recognizable locations. First up, it's

First Baptist Church pretending to be a courthouse! The church was built in the 1830s in the Greek Revival style, which was very typical at that time. I have had people on my tours comment that Christ Church, also from the same time period and of the same style, looks like a courthouse, so I'm not surprised the production team felt this one did too. I read in one of the newspaper articles about Savannah that they shot the interiors in an actual historic courthouse in Effingham County.

A lot of the in-town scenes were done around Chippewa Square for some reason. Here is Ward Allen's eventual wife, Lucy, crouched in the square with his dog. You can see the pedestal of the Oglethorpe monument there just left of center.

Here is Ward Allen coming to deliver freshly shot fowl to Lucy's house (romantic?) on Perry Street, which, again, is right alongside Chippewa Square.

I must pause to point out one little detail that drove me nuts. See that sort of small beige box on the door frame to the right of Ward Allen's elbow? Yeah, I'm pretty sure this house actually has an intercom or something right there. I meant to go have a look myself, but never got around to it. It drives me crazy that the production team just, I don't know, stuck a box over it? It doesn't look like something that belongs there in 1918, it looks like something that's being covered up. They couldn't use a plant or swing the camera around and shoot from the other direction or something? Argh!

Also very close to Chippewa Square is the Harper-Fowlkes House (I'd recognize that back porch anywhere!), which served as the duck market (duck monger's?). I must say, that is a very, very clean and sparsely populated open-air market. That was another small problem I had with this movie: it feels a little bit sterile and a little bit empty. I'm sure it's because they could only afford to hire and costume so many extras and there's a limit to how much dirt you can truck in to cover the street when you've only got a $1 million budget. Oh, speaking of dirt!

I often tell my tourists it's so easy to shoot a period film here. You just get rid of the parking meters and cover the street in dirt and you're in business! Unclaimed Freight clearly operates under the same philosophy. This is a shot of Christmas Moultrie with the camera pointing out from behind the columns of First Baptist Courthou- I mean Church. As is the norm, they hid the asphalt with a tractor load of soil and mulch. And how fortunate most of the sidewalks downtown are herringbone brick and not concrete. I am a little insulted, however. Savannah is not so backward that we were still putting up with dirt roads after WWI. The major streets at the very least, like Bull Street there, had already been paved in brick for a few decades. Hmph.

Aside from places, I was able to spot a few people I recognized as well. Here we have Savannah's favorite ice cream man, Stratton Leopold!

Stratton Leopold is the owner of Leopold's Ice Cream, which has been in business since 1919, never mind a three decade hiatus. He is also a successful movie producer, so seeing him in front of the camera took me by surprise. He only has a brief scene near the end in one of Christmas Moultrie's flashbacks.

Then I got to see a much closer acquaintance of mine, or at least he is since I was in Our Town at Asbury Methodist in November:

It's the Reverend Billy Hester! He runs Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, which also has a killer theatre program. Performing in Our Town there was one of the things that distracted me through the fall and kept me from blogging for such a long time. Billy and his wife Cheri do, in fact, have professional acting resumes. Cheri was also in Our Town. I played Mrs. Gibbs and she played my neighbor Mrs. Webb. She told me a little bit about living in New York many years ago and how she used to be a hand model there for a little while. She said that was a really weird job. I think we got on that topic because I complimented her manicure. Anyway, later on she was telling some of us about Billy's involvement in Savannah and that she was kind of annoyed he ended up in this costume here-

-without any on-screen explanation. So why is Billy wearing Wickham's coat from Pride & Prejudice?

According to Cheri, poor Billy is the foolish-looking victim of the editing process. There was a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor in which a bunch of these guys are involved in some kind of historical reenactment. Probably Civil War something, but I can't remember now. So, Billy's just stuck there in his last scene looking like he raided his great grandpa's steamer trunk long before Macklemore made that sort of thing trendy.

At this point, I have to give credit where it's due and show you where, I think, most of the budget went.

I don't know how much these wheeling aerial shots cost, but I'm guessing "nearly all of the money". At first, seeing the camera swoop over the marsh every few minutes annoyed me because I thought it was gratuitous, if attractive, padding. Then I realized, "Oh, duh, Ward Allen is a duck hunter. This is the perspective of a bird in flight." Once I got it, I really appreciated these moments for their cinematic beauty and atmospheric serenity. Also, the music was really good. Then the movie had to go and vaporize my good will with one of the very last shots:

Seriously?! You've been spoiling me for nearly two hours with graceful visuals and now you offend my eyeballs with this obvious and heinous green screen? Not even Jim Caviezel is pretty enough to make up for it!

Ok, so, I would not call Savannah a failure, but it had some pretty serious shortcomings. Most of the problems are with the writing, honestly. I applaud Unclaimed Freight for choosing to make a movie about a local hero in a small(ish) city embroiled in conflicts that hardly anyone alive now can appreciate. The thing about trying to turn an extremely localized story into a successful movie is you have to find some way to universalize it, even for Savannahians like me. I didn't know a thing about Ward Allen or why he might be interesting. I still feel like I'm waiting for some kind of punchline. There were a lot of ways to tell Ward Allen's story, but this movie felt like it was trying to tell it in all directions at once. There were many themes to choose from and I really wish the writer and director had chosen one, maybe two, and developed that more fully. Is this a love story between Ward Allen and Lucy? Is it a story of stalwart devotion between a black man and white man in the racist turn-of-the-century South? Is it about a man who eschews society's expectations and chooses wildness over civility? Is it about a vanishing way of life? Sadly, Savannah tried to cover all these things, which left the finished product feeling rather shallow.

I had some problems with the structure too. Framing it as a flashback from Jack Cay's perspective is kind of ok, since the movie is based on his book. The problem there is that Ward Allen was dead long before Jack Cay came along, so Cay's recollections are actually stories that were told to him by Allen's pal, Christmas Moultrie. That mean's Cay's flashbacks are actually someone else's flashbacks. And then the characters experience flashbacks of their own within those flashbacks! It's disorienting and, frankly, sloppy. If you are not Christopher Nolan, you probably should not be creating a world with that many levels. I understand the desire to make sure Jack Cay had some kind of presence in the film, but perhaps it would have been better from a storytelling perspective to streamline things and let Christmas Moultrie alone tell it from his perspective. At any rate, no more flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, ok? And certainly not from multiple points of view.

I'm a little undecided about the acting, particularly Jim Caviezel. I read a critic's assertion somewhere that Caviezel was the only actor in Hollywood who could underplay while still overacting. It made me giggle and it may be correct. I enjoy watching him play Mr. Reese on Person of Interest, but I really watch that show for Michael Emerson. Seeing Caviezel in Savannah didn't really sway me one way or another, though. Jaimie Alexander had little enough to do in this movie, really. Lucy is a character that comes in strong already and never really grows from there. I guess it's forgivable since this movie wasn't about her. I found Chiwetel Ejiofor's Christmas Moultrie to be the most relatable and real person in the film, though there wasn't nearly enough of him. Why would you put a talent like Ejiofor in your movie and then hardly give him anything to do? Part of the problem was that Ejiofor came across so easy and natural and it made everybody else look like they were acting. Also, there were the accents. I've gone over this already and yes, the dreaded Hollywood Southern was in full, ear-bleeding force here. Poor Jaimie Alexander came off especially bad. How can that be when she was born and raised in the South?! Then again, it's happened before: see Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. Chiwetel Ejiofor sounded most natural to me and he's English! Same deal in 12 Years a Slave, which featured two other English actors as Southern plantation owners. Why are English actors so much better at this than American actors?

There you have my thoughts on Savannah. Worth watching? I guess if you're a completest (like me). It's fun picking out people and places I recognize. But if you don't live here it may not stand up too well on its own merits. If you like watching Jim Caviezel pretend to be uproariously drunk a whole lot, though- go for it!

Savannah Scenes #2: Glory

Ok, let's just gloss over the fact I have neglected this blog way, way too long (Look, I was in a show, then it was the holidays, and we also had to move my unwell grandma up here from Florida- my neglect is completely legitimate!) and pick up right where I left off. Luckily for me, being on a budget as I am, the library system here has many locally shot movies available for free. I watched Glory months ago and I've got another DVD sitting on the shelf that's due soon, so I need to get this post taken care of and move on to the next one.

Glory came out in 1989 and it's about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the Federal army's first all-black regiment. We're talking about the Civil War, of course. This regiment was perhaps obscure to most (white) Americans before 1989, but we live in a post-Glory world now, so you better be ashamed of your ignorance if you don't already know what I'm talking about. Much of the story's first half, training the soldiers and whatnot, is set in Massachusetts, whereas the second half, the attack, is set in South Carolina. Exactly none of the movie was shot in either one of those places. It was all shot here, near here, and down the Georgia coast.

A lot of the scenery is in some random field or woods or marsh that could be anyplace nearby, but several locations were easily recognizable to me. After the opening battle sequence, things slow down for a minute and you see all these Federal bigwigs hobnobbing inside some fancy, fancy house. Then, Matthew Broderick (as Robert Gould Shaw, the 54th's newly appointed commander) steps outside the front door and has a chat with Carey Elwes while leaning against the front gate of the house.

Oh, hi, Mercer-Williams House! Yeah, they used it for the interior as well as exterior shots. I knew that, yet I had kinda forgotten and it caught me by surprise for a moment. Now, some of you undoubtedly know this was the infamous residence of Jim Williams, the Savannah socialite forever immortalized in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Speaking of which, I guess I'll have to cover that one too eventually. Anyway, Williams was still alive and living at the house during the shoot. I can't remember if he had finally been acquitted of murdering Danny Hanson yet or if he was still tied up with his fourth trial. I could check THE BOOK I suppose, but I just don't feel like it. Hey, this is a blog, not an essay. Go find yourself a Grad student if you want real work.

I had a family of five for a tour recently and mentioned the movie to them when we walked by the house. One of the guys was a fan of Glory and was so pleased when I told him it had been shot here in Savannah. He had no idea. (I guess he never bothered to watch any of the extras on the DVD?) I snatched that pic up there from Flickr just so you'd know which house I was talking about. I found screen captures online for several of the other locations I'll mention, but simply could not find that one scene with Broderick in front of the Mercer House! I don't know what the deal is with that.

So then the action moves to Jones Street for a minute or two where the new recruits are signing up:

I think that's the block between Whitaker and Barnard. Remember now, this is all supposed to be in Massachusetts. It's great how Savannah can dress up as pretty much any 19th century American city. It's definitely way cheaper than filming in Boston and way warmer when you're shooting in February and March (like these guys). I often tell people on my tours all you have to do to film a period piece here is remove the parking meters, cover the street in dirt and poof! Unclaimed Freight Productions turned that formula on its head, though, when they filmed CBGB here in 2012. Don't worry Punk fans- I'll get to that one later!

So, the next location to catch my eye was the training ground for the new recruits of the 54th Mass. Their barracks was our roundhouse:

I am ashamed to admit this, but I have never visited the Georgia State Railroad Museum. I know, I know! Shut up. It's on my to-do list. I did attend a friend's wedding there a few years ago. According to the Coastal Heritage Society  the "Georgia State Railroad Museum is believed to be the largest and most complete antebellum railroad repair facility still in existence, in the world!" You can tell they're very excited about that. So, if trains are your thing, you'll be glad to know this place is just a couple blocks west of the Historic District, right down Louisville Rd. Even though I haven't toured the place (yes, I know- shame!), I still knew exactly what I was looking at because of the distinctive, massively recognizable round smoke stack you see in the middle there. I watched the DVD's commentary track and the director said the point of setting the barracks there was to emphasize the built-up and industrial nature of the North so it would contrast with the later scenes that take place the pastoral South.

Most of the good stuff develops in this camp. You know, it occurs to me how gutsy it is to make a Civil War movie that sets most of its action far away from the battlefield. But Glory isn't so much about fighting, it's more about becoming. Robert Gould Shaw starts off as a privileged, though diffident, gentleman and transforms into a real commander. The black men he commands go on different journeys. Thomas (Andre Braugher) learns to be a fighter, Trip (Denzel Washington) learns to stop picking fights all the time, and Morgan Freeman, um... ok, not sure on that one. He's a mentor... which he is in every movie. Well, if I owned a copy of that DVD and could watch it again, I'm sure I'd pick up on something. And the white folks all around them, um, a few of them learn to be ever so slightly less racist. A tiny bit. Keep in mind I'm talking about the movie here. I know that in reality probably nobody involved with the 54th Mass. was anywhere near so lovable. It all made for good cinema, though.

Moving on to the last location shot I want to point out:

Look, it's River Street! But where's the river? Since when does River Street have two sides? What black magic is this?!

I remember another tour guide (Who was it? Was it Don?) telling me about this. To shoot the scene where the army parades down a street in Boston, the production team did up the buildings on one side of River Street, then built a facade of completely fake buildings down the other side. They did a bang-up job. I had to stare at this scene pretty hard before I could spot anything I recognized. In this screencap, you can easily make out the dome of our City Hall right in the back. I don't think that's architecturally appropriate to the mid-19th century, but I bet the filmmakers shrugged and figured nobody would be looking at that anyway. Movie makers do that a lot, actually. It's funny how often they're right. In one shot of this scene, I think I also juuuuuuust made out the edge of the Hyatt behind Matthew Broderick's head during a close-up. Ah, sometimes an inch of framing is all that separates the 1860s from the 1960s.

There was shooting in other nearby locations, but nothing especially recognizable. One salt marsh or woodland looks much like another. The last part, where they attack the fort, was done on Jekyll Island, about 1 1/2 hours down the coast. I really need to get my act together and visit Jekyll Island too. That's another thing on my to-do list.

So, my opinion of Glory? I liked it more than I thought I would. I don't usually care much for war movies and I'm always bored to tears by the Civil War (bad Southerner!). I was afraid at the beginning this was going to be one of those movies that's ostensibly about black people, then the whole story is told from the perspective of some white main character. Hollywood reduces black people (or other minorities) to second-class status within their own narrative all the time because it makes the head honchos feel safer about their investment.  It looks like I was mistaken, though. It did feel like a movie about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry and not about Robert Gould Shaw. I know Matthew Broderick got top billing (and that was probably a marketing strategy), but it was much more of an A-list ensemble piece. Glory shows up pretty well if you do a race-centric version of the Bechdel test on it: 1) it has at least two named black characters in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something besides the white characters.

All in all, Glory is a classic Savannahians can be proud of the city's involvement in. But I'm not getting too comfortable. I know I've got a whole lot of bad-to-mediocre movies coming at me. Stay tuned....

Savannah Scenes #1: Cape Fear (1962)

This seems like a good opportunity to initiate a little project I've been thinking about for a while. I'm gonna round up every movie I can get my hands on that was shot in Savannah and write about them! I bet you've watched all kinds of movies that were shot here and you didn't even know. I mean, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is kind of a giveaway, but how about Glory (which I haven't seen) or Something to Talk About (which I... also haven't seen) or The Last Song (which I'm not looking forward to seeing)? Not to mention the just-released independent film Savannah, starring Jim Caviezel, and the to-be released on October 11th CBGB with Alan Rickman! Ok, I guess it's a no-brainer a movie called Savannah would be shot here, but CBGB is about that club in New York. Savannah substituted for 1970s New York City in a movie about the birthplace of punk rock! That is hilarious and how would you ever have guessed if I didn't tell you? This project may morph into a movie-centric walking tour. There's only one movie tour in town and that's Savannah Movie Tours. I suppose I could ride along with them to snag some material, but I don't want to poach their stuff. Besides, Georgia's decade-long film making dry spell ended in about 2010 when the legislature finally put together a real sweet incentives package to lure filming back here. Worked like magic and now there are all sorts of new movie stories to assemble. I know several actors in town who have had small speaking parts in various movies or who got to be extras. I'm sure I can round up some good stuff. Hell, I was an extra myself in an episode of Ruby several years back. If you ever watched that show, by the way, my dad is a mailman and delivers the mail to her house.

So, I begin my new adventure with a silver screen classic: Cape Fear, the 1962 original starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. I became aware of this movie last summer when SCAD's Cinema Circle screened it at the Trustees Theater. I really wanted to go because Connect Savannah did a very nice write up about it and mentioned much of the movie was shot in Savannah. Robert Mitchum was even arrested for real in this town and put on a Georgia chain gang when he was about 14. Reportedly, he was not very happy to come back to Savannah for filming. I missed the show because of work or something and have been meaning to rent a copy ever since. How lucky I am it popped up under the Free Movies heading in Comcast On Demand!

I had a great time watching it last week. It was such a surprise to see the Universal International logo, then BAM! there was the Gordon monument in the middle of Wright Square:

Yeah, I used my iPhone to snap pictures of the screen. There was probably a slicker way to get these images, but oh well. Technology fail, yeah!

Then POOF! there was the Customs House and Bay Street (and Robert Mitchum prancing through traffic like a total fool, a very dangerous thing to do on Bay Street today).

Then Mitchum went sailing right inside the front door of City Hall. They used the actual interior of City Hall too. God, the set designer had the easiest job in the world for the first half of this movie. That old elevator shaft on Mitchum's right is still there and still looks just like that and they still use the damn thing:

For Mitchum's first ominous encounter with Gregory Peck, when he reaches in the window and snatches the keys out of his car, all that was done in a Bay Street parking lot just east of City Hall in front of the Cotton Exchange. Don't worry, I don't have any cheesy pictures of that. I was puzzled for a little while, though, by this shot right here:

It's implied that's a restaurant in town, close to the docks. There is, in fact, a restaurant on River Street called The Boar's Head Grill and Tavern, but there's no way this shot could have been done anywhere near there. You would never see exposed shore and waves washing up anywhere along the waterfront. If you do, that means you've gotten your stupid self caught here in the middle of a hurricane. I had to review these few seconds a couple of times to convince myself this was a fake. It looks so much like the actual Boar's Head and yet not quite. The real Boar's Head says on their website they originally opened up in 1959. I wonder if someone saw that restaurant and decided to recreate the exterior in a more preferable location. The interiors were certainly done on a sound stage.

Later on in the movie, we have a clear view of the old Armstrong House, which is supposed to be the girls' school Gregory Peck's daughter attends:

That's it there on the left. I only just now remembered Armstrong Junior College (Armstrong Atlantic State University these days) didn't leave that location and move to the south side until 1965. I'm so accustomed to walking by that house and knowing it's been a law firm for decades, it feels weird to look at it and know it was still a college at the time.

Just as Gregory Peck's movie daughter is getting out of school, we get these shots of Robert Mitchum-

-striding through Forsyth Park as sinisterly as a man can stride anywhere. Of course our signature fountain had to be in this movie somewhere. I'm beginning to wonder if that's a legal requirement for every movie that shoots in this town.

Those are most of the recognizable bits that caught my eye. I'm pretty sure the Bowden family home (Gregory Peck's character) was also somewhere around here, but I didn't recognize it. Looked like it might be on Skidaway Island or something. If I owned a DVD of this movie with a commentary track, maybe it would say. Oh yeah, and some of the shots on the beach looked like they were actually done around the Tybee Pier. I don't know about the marina scenes when Peck first takes a swing at Mitchum, but one marina looks much like another to me. I guess they probably shot the cypress swamp/river scenes around here too. They would only have to drive a few miles outside of town to put in boats at the Ogeechee. All the finale with the houseboat and everything was clearly done on a sound stage back in L.A. A very well-built one, but still a sound stage.

So, my thoughts on the experience of watching Cape Fear? It blew my mind how much downtown Savannah still looks just the same. I did spot a few background items, the facades of which have since been restored, or buildings I know were torn down later in the 60s or 70s. But really, it looked to me like someone parked a bunch of vintage cars on the street, stocked up on some black and white film, and rolled camera. That movie could have been shot yesterday. As for the movie itself, the script is tight and tense, it tackles uncomfortable subject matter without being salacious about it, all the actors hit the right pitch, and all of the characters are well-developed and smart. Thrillers these days have an awful tendency to feature characters who compound their difficulties by making obviously stupid decisions. What I love about Cape Fear is that the good guys get deeper and deeper in trouble in spite of making all the right decisions. I think this movie is a noir masterpiece and it makes me proud to know it was shot here.

If you are a Cape Fear fan, as I now am, why sit at home and admire the setting from afar? Schedule a trip down here and take a walk with me in the very footsteps of Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck! I promise not to drown you, shoot you, or hit you in the head with a rock.

And then they came for my house museums....

The neighbors are at it again. Tour guides and tour company owners like myself have already spent more than a year dodging the choler lobbed at us by Historic District residents. Looks like the house museums are up next. Guess it's their turn. I don't mind the reprieve, frankly. I'm being a little unfair, I know. The downtown residents are often my ideological allies, such as when they furiously defended their turf against the encroachment of double-decker tour buses. That prevented a massively stupid development, utterly inappropriate to this setting, while also eliminating another potential competitor for me. Denizens of downtown also vocally opposed the possibility of a cruise ship terminal along our waterfront, which probably would have been no less disastrous for us than it has been for Charleston. I do think City Council would have reached that conclusion on their own, but it's still nice to know someone's got an eye on them. I love Savannah too and find comfort knowing it is inhabited by these legionnaires of legality who will leap to the city's defense at the tiniest provocation and save me the trouble of rattling my own saber. (I don't have one.)

Sometimes my allies become my enemies, though, as a result of our differing requirements: I use the Historic District to earn a living and they use it to live in. While tour operators sometimes make the mistake of dismissing residents' needs or simply having no manners while on the job, downtown residents sometimes make the mistake of being peevishly possessive and misdirected in their ire, which has led to the present kerfuffle with the house museums.

The Savannah Morning News ran this article, "Issues arise with historic home," on July 17. The follow-up ran in Sunday's paper: "Museum operators wary of potential ordinance change". Basically, it's been all party-party at the Harper-Fowlkes House over on Orleans Square for two years and the people who live nearby are "fed up" (as the two articles repeatedly state). They got the City onto it and the Harper-Fowlkes House Trustees were cited for breaking the Savannah Zoning Ordinance. As it turns out, it is illegal for the museums to lease themselves out for private events because they do not count as "assembly halls" under the definition spelled out in the ordinance, which dates from 1960. The first article cites Metropolitan Planning Commission staffers calling it an "error... of omission". It also says that nobody ever enforced the prohibition except when there were complaints.

Ok, let's deal with the legal issues on this one first, then I'll get into the financial problems. The people living near the Harper-Fowlkes House or any other museum have every right to be annoyed when that venue hosts disruptive events. However, I think the neighbors on Orleans Square are mistaken in coming down so hard on the Harper-Fowlkes House Trustees, which were guilty only of rudeness and amended their booking practices in February. The real problems here are 1) the City's failure to update a 53 year old ordinance that was written at a time when no sane person would want to have a wedding or party of any sort in downtown Savannah and 2) the City's failure to enforce it's own crap rules until somebody compels them to do so. Lackadaisical enforcement of existing ordinances is also a problem in the tourism industry. Along that line, Adam Van Brimmer (the columnist) pointed out in Sunday's article that use of the Charles Morris Center in Trustees Garden for special events is also illegal under the current rules. Charles Morris developed that area expressly for the purpose of hosting special events! Did no one review the paperwork when he was building it? I mean, there is a ton of permitting and bureaucratic hoop-jumping involved in restoration and new construction and nobody at the City realized, "Hey wait a minute- this compound's very reason for existing is illegal"? Seriously? And house museums all over the Historic District have been hosting weddings and receptions with no complaints for years. I don't think any of the curators even knew it was illegal (or at least none are copping to it), and who can blame them if the City has never enforced this law before? So, neighbors of the Harper-Fowlkes House, while it was wrong of the museum to ignore your initial complaints, the real problem here is that we are all saddled with a dumb and outdated ordinance and the City has no desire to enforce it anyway.

Your grievances having been acknowledged, what is it you want, downtown neighbors? The Harper-Fowlkes House made the initial mistake of setting few restrictions on event hours and noise, probably because they lacked experience handling that kind of thing. The proposed amendment to the ordinance which is under consideration now would set hours for music, delivery and breakdown of equipment, and require each historic property to petition the Zoning Board of Appeals for every event. That sounds alright to me, but the attorney representing the spurned inhabitants of Perry Street is quoted as saying it "doesn't protect the neighbors" without any elaboration. That was in the first article, but the second one provides no further clarification. What is that supposed to mean? And is the lawyer actually being vague or is this just a case of bad reporting? Because I really have no idea what the problem is and it makes the people involved seem vindictive and childish.

I have no doubt some of the aggrieved individuals are making their gripe without having a proper idea of how the museums function and what they require in order to keep functioning. Tour guides have encountered the same problem- people making counter productive proposals because they don't know how the industry works. One of the neighbor ladies is quoted as saying, about the Harper-Fowlkes House, "The house that once had been a hallowed hall became a setting for loud, even raucous parties in the courtyard." First of all, I hate when I hear tired old phrases like "hallowed hall." Almost nothing we now think of as a "hallowed hall" ever actually was, much less a building that used to be somebody's house. People lived in there. And let me tell you, no one knows how to party like 19th-century high-society! The underwear was crotchless and all the drugs were legal, so you just work that equation out on your own. But that misperception is a minor personal peeve and has nothing to do with this legal conflict, really.

Time to talk about money. The perilous thing about this quarrel is it endangers a vital revenue stream for local museums. Where do people think the money comes from to maintain these houses? The people who own historic property downtown must have an idea how much their homes cost them. I would expect them to have more sympathy for curators who have to magic up the money to maintain large houses and gardens while also minimizing the compounding damage from thousands of visitors tramping through every year. I'll bet you a dollar at least some of the angry neighbors who started this legal action assume museums are able to cover their costs with only admission fees and the money they get from hosting weddings and stuff is just "extra". Luckily, the article from August 4th cited some real numbers to combat that impression: the Harper-Fowlkes House made $90,000 off rentals last year, but still faces a $70,000 shortfall this year; rentals make up 5% of the Davenport House's revenue; and the Telfair Museum stages 50 external events a year that subsidize 150 educational programs it presents all year long. Several other museums in town are considering renting themselves out for special occasions because they need the money, so a lot of people have their eye on how City Council updates the ordinance.

So, I hope City Council comes through on this one (they get things right sometimes) and works up a satisfactory amendment. They've already gotten off to a blazing start by... postponing action for another six weeks. Well... the slower they move, the easier it is to catch them before they do something stupid.

In sickness and in health

Why is it when I really want some more business, there are no tourists to be found and when I really, really wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, tourists from near and far suddenly start burning up my cell phone minutes? Convenient timing is never an option when you're self-employed, is it? Let me back up. It all began, I'm pretty sure, on May 29th. I had a couple of people for a ghost tour and began to notice partway through I was having a little trouble speaking. As in, I had slight difficulty getting air to make noise as it exited my mouth. Whatever. I shrugged it off. The next day, I had one tour in the morning, then two tours in a row later on. The later tours were both with the same ladies- a history tour first, then a ghost tour. They had Living Social vouchers to redeem. Now, by the time I got around to meeting those two ladies late in the afternoon, I knew I was not entirely well. I felt perfectly fine, but my throat had become increasingly sore and my voice distressingly insubstantial. By the time I got home that night, I was swallowing razor blades and could barely even drink anything. I forswore speech in the hope all would be well the next morning. No small talk with the cats, no blathering to myself like a lunatic. Complete nun-like silence.

The pain had dissipated by morning, but I still kept my mouth shut because I had a large tour scheduled for that evening and was doing my best to save my voice. This was no ordinary tour: my friend Christa and I had been planning it for a while. Christa is the webmistress for the local branch of this group I hang with called No Kidding. It's a social group for people who don't have kids. Anyway, she had asked me months beforehand if I would like to conduct a ghost tour for No Kidding and I thought it would be fun. I did a history tour with much of the local gang last year. Since I have a policy of not making repeat customers pay when they bring new people, I knew that would complicate things this time around. How could I remember who had done it before and who hadn't? And most of the group was bound to be repeats anyway. So, I had the brilliant idea to do the tour for free, but in exchange for tips and, most importantly, online reviews. Christa sent the word out via Evite, but that got only a tepid response, so I expanded the circle and created an invitation on Facebook as well. I think I sent it to around 80 people. I knew, of course, only perhaps 30 would respond at all, maybe 18 would plan to come, and at least a few of those would flake out. So, I was not worried at all about having too large a crowd. There you have my plan for Friday, May 31st: meet group of friends and acquaintances at 8pm in Johnson Square, deliver 90-minute ghost tour, rake in tips, beg for internet reviews. I knew a bunch of people were coming, I knew some of them were bringing friends and had kind of planned their night around it; it was important to me not to pull the plug on the whole thing since rescheduling and getting everyone to commit again would be impossible.

So....

My mom called late Friday morning and I answered my phone. Imagine my horror, my utter dismay, when I found I could not speak! I could barely make any noise at all! Poor Mom on the other end of the line said, "Are you there? I can't hear you" a couple of times before I was able to make her understand me. It doesn't help that my cell phone typically gets poor reception inside my apartment, so she probably thought it was a technical malfunction at first. It wasn't until she actually said, "Oh, you have laryngitis" that I thought, "Oh God, I do have laryngitis!" Noooooooooooo! I earn my living talking to people! How could this have happened? I've had my voice get a little tired and my throat a get little sore after putting in a long day, but never anything this catastrophic! And just when I had tours on my book through the weekend!

I put a notice on Facebook about my predicament, but let everyone know we would go ahead as planned. 8pm rolled around and I was all set in Johnson Square. I ended up with a nicely sized group of 17 people. By the time we began, I was able to make an unattractive squawking noise and form it into word sounds. I told everyone they had to stand real close and listen real hard. If it had to be that way, I'm glad it was with people I knew and who would be sympathetic.We had a good time, but I was glad when it was over. At least my ploy worked. I did well on tips and racked up a few new reviews on TripAdvisor and on my Google listing. Kyle at the Small Business Development Center tells me Google likes to show you off in the search results more if you've got reviews with them. Sure thing, Google. Whatever it takes. Some generous souls even added reviews to my listing on Yelp.

I was supposed to do another ghost tour at 10, but had broken down and asked those people if we could move it to the same time the following night. They kindly agreed, which was such a relief to me. (As it turned out, I still wasn't in very good shape the next night, but oh well.) I almost never ask people to reschedule or cancel a tour. I think the only time I ever cancelled on people was a few years ago when I became very sick for no apparent reason and rolled around in pain all night. So, rest assured, if I ever call you up and cancel or ask to move your appointment, it's only because I have been rendered physically incapable of providing the tour you want.

After that Friday, I began to feel the cold (I guess it was a cold) the laryngitis had heralded. And of course it knocked me flat right when I had some steady business. There was so much phlegm in so many wrong places! It made me cough hard enough to hurt myself and the cough kept me up at night and made me so tired. I was able to work, but wasn't good for much else once I got home. The cold wasn't debilitating enough to justify staying in bed, but just severe enough to afflict me with low-grade misery whenever I was conscious. It went on for weeks. I'm not sure I've ever had an illness that lingered so badly. I'm still coping with the last remnants of that hellacious post-nasal drip even as I write this. I'm not sure that was an ordinary cold at all. I don't know what that was. I'm glad I'm (mostly) over it. Naturally, now that I'm not hacking like a 19th century consumptive, there are almost no appointments on my book.

Figures.

Savannah: impulse-buy of the South

Savannah's actual nickname is "The Hostess City of the South," but I'm thinking we need to change that. For one thing, I always get this picture in my head of one of those little Hostess snack cakes (the chocolate ones with the white squigglies on top) and the Talmadge Bridge in the background. For an another, it's completely inaccurate. Savannah rarely gets the chance to play hostess to anyone because no one ever takes the time to make plans before coming here. Despite the best efforts of the Tourism Leadership Council and Visit Savannah, this place is still not a primary vacation destination. It's an afterthought for most people or an impulsive last-minute decision at best. I'm not the only person to make this observation. I've been hitting up the downtown concierges a lot lately (trying to drum up some business) and many of them have been telling me the same thing. It really seems to be the case that people just sort of wake up in the morning and say, "I think I'll go to Savannah today." So, they drive down from Atlanta or up from Jacksonville or whatever, stagger into the hotel, set their luggage down, then stand around with no idea what to do. They confusedly gravitate toward the biggest, shiniest attraction they see, like bewildered, sunburned little moths. That's how everybody ends up on a 90-minute ride with Old Town Trolley and a brief sojourn on River Street, then drives back home Sunday morning thinking they've covered all the important stuff and have no need to return and continue exploring. It makes me sad. Most of the reservations I get are from people who are in town only for the day or only for the weekend, lots of last-minute gigs. The time I meet up with them is about the time they are just beginning to realize there is a lot more to do here than they thought and they should have planned ahead or should have planned to stay longer. Hardly anyone ever tells me they are staying for a week or two weeks or a month. I can probably count the number of such tourists I've met on one hand. I have met many people who tell me they have come to Savannah several times, but "Never made it up from River Street." Oh, that also makes me so, so sad.

What people also tell me is that they have been to Charleston several times or they've been coming to Hilton Head for years and finally decided to spend a day in Savannah. A lot of visitors only think to come here once they have exhausted all the good stuff in neighboring cities (or think they have, anyway). Savannah doesn't appear to be a first choice for much of the traveling public. It's the place you go to when Charleston, Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Jacksonville have all lost their appeal. I do find it encouraging that some of those same people also say, "There's so much to do here!" or "It's so beautiful- we should have come sooner!" But will it be in their budget to come back again any time soon or even in the next few years? I don' t know. I also meet a lot of tourists who are on their way to or from somewhere else. "Oh, we're going down to Miami and decided to spend a day in Savannah." "We're coming back up from Florida to Virginia and are stopping in historic cities along the way." Savannah tends to be part of a larger itinerary, not an attraction in and of itself. People don't come to coastal Georgia for the purpose of visiting Savannah. They visit Savannah because they happened to be in coastal Georgia.

So, there you have my little theory. Savannah is the vacation equivalent of an impulse-buy, an item you tack onto your list after you've already checked off the "important" stuff. Hm. In that way, I guess it is like one of those little snack cakes that grabs your attention as you're pushing your cart toward the cash register. Well, that does add a new layer of meaning to our title as Hostess City.

"Where's your accent?"

Oh mah Gawd! I really wish I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me that on a tour, or its variation "You don't sound southern." I would have enough dollars to pull a Scrooge McDuck and swan dive into a vault full of them (much softer than gold coins).  Do people in other parts of the country get asked that as often as Southerners? Do Canadians go to Chicago and ask the folks there "Where's your midwestern accent, eh?" (Not a stereotype. Canadians totally say "eh"- I've heard them.) Do Hawaiians visit New Jersey (though why you would trade Hawaii for Jersey is anyone's guess) and ask "Hey, how come you don't sound like that guy from Cake Boss?" I wasn't even doing one of my own tours last week, but training with the Savannah Slow Ride, when a lady from Philadelphia asked me that. I especially love the way people say "You don't sound southern," accusatory emphasis on the "sound," as if I'm an imposter infiltrating the Old South for some nefarious purpose or maybe just screwing with them in particular. I used to get that a lot when I worked as a cashier at Cracker Barrel years and years ago. I think diners at the restaurant felt cheated because here they were in the most countrified eatery they could possibly find and the cashier didn't even have the courtesy to sound like a good little redneck.

Look, people, Southerners don't live in a vacuum any more than you do. We're really just like you except we survive in a hotter, sweatier part of the country. Also, our food is better. There are many factors affecting my accent. For one thing, Savannah is a city. Not an especially big one, but it's not a podunk hick town either. Just as with any city, especially one with a port, Savannahians and their accents have long been been influenced by the myriad people with their myriad languages and dialects going to and fro. We have never been isolated. Within the city itself, accents vary depending on class, level of education, and outside influence. If you were born here, but your family had moved from Virginia, you might not sound the same as your neighbor whose family has been here for 5 generations. So, the local accent can vary from household to household and even within the same family. My sister sounds noticeably more southern than me and we grew up together! Similarly, my dad and his sister (my aunt June) were both born and raised here and grew up in the same house; their speech is very different, however. She sounds just how you'd expect a southern woman to sound, but he sounds like he could be from anywhere. In his case, it may have something to do with a lifetime of high academic achievement, including two college degrees. I don't know why, but higher education tends to refine regional accents. As for me, I think it's because I have been involved in theatre since I was a kid and part of the process is learning to speak clearly and without an accent. Also, lots of reading and high academic achievement.

I know some of you have been led far astray in your expectations by the media, especially Hollywood. Let's start with the grandmother of all bad, bad Southern accents- Gone with the Wind. If you love that movie, that's just fine. It is a Technicolor American masterpiece. It is a classic. But Vivian Leigh's Georgia accent was rubbish. Pure, putrilaginous, infuriatingly persistent rubbish. It's been a while since I've watched that movie, but I don't remember being convinced by anybody's fakety-fake accent. Scarlet herself sounded the worst, though. Nobody down here talks like that. Nobody ever talked like that. The only people who talk like that are gay men named David and Blanche Deveraux. And it's an affectation for both of them. What drives me nuts about Gone with the Wind more than anything is it set the tone in Hollywood from that point forward. Actors portraying Southern characters would just lazily adopt Scarlet O'Hara's idiotic style of speaking without any consideration for regional differences in accent. They couldn't be bothered to put the work into getting it right. For everyone in the country who didn't live south of the Mason-Dixon line, that was usually good enough. For everyone who did live south of the Mason-Dixon line, it was an insult. So, for decades movies have only acknowledged two kinds of Southerners: affected society belles who talk like Scarlet O'Hara and inbred bigots who are barely comprehensible. I'm here to tell you there is a lot of variation in between those two extremes.

So, let's discuss where media portrayal of the Southern accent is going in the 21st century. To address the Savannah connection first and foremost on your mind, Paula Deen, let me go ahead and tell you what any native Savannahian will tell you: She ain't from here. Paula Deen lives on Wilmington Island now, but she's originally from Albany, GA (or "Al-benny," as they pronounce it there). Albany is straight west and a little bit south of here, in the middle of the state. I've never been there, but I have driven west all the way to Americus and I can tell you that part of Georgia ain't nothin' but two-lane state roads and pecan groves. It's exactly where you would expect to find a more isolated population with a more pronounced accent. But also, Paula Deen has an image to maintain now and that image is Southern and sassy, so I'm sure she dials it up a little bit for the cameras.

Outside The Food Network, Southern characters have been developing a stronger and less cartoonish presence on TV. Gone are the days of Gomer Pyle and Andy Griffith; arrived are the days of Sherrif Rick (The Walking Dead) and Detective Amanda Rollins (Law & Order: SVU). These are characters who happen to be southern and who play an active part in their respective series, not southern "characters" whose only job is to lighten up the situation by acting like ignorant rubes. Basically, the southern straight man has finally become a reality, at least on TV. Feature films still kind of seem to lag behind. The most recent cinematic release I can think of that portrayed a bunch of southerners living in the Deep South was Beautiful Creatures and that thing was a mess. Plus, Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson are English, as was Vivien Leigh, and we all know how that turned out. Oh, wait, there was also Beasts of the Southern Wild. That one's set in Louisiana, and Louisiana is a very special case when it comes to accents (or anything, really). Still, everyone sounded convincing to me, though I remain ambivalent about the movie as a whole. Anyway, Hollywood is still a bit of a wasteland when it comes to taking people with southern accents seriously, but television has really opened up. There are characters with noticeable accents on Law & Order: SVU, CSI, CSI: Miami; there are multiple shows set in southern states like Justified (so I've never watched it, but it is set in Tennessee), The Walking Dead, and True Blood (which I have also never watched because I'm too poor for HBO, but it's set in Louisiana). And it may surprise you to learn that silly fluff like May Name is Earl also scores pretty well on the accent-meter.

So, fear not, dear Yankees! You are not being cheated. The truth is,  I do speak with a southern accent. You just don't know what that accent actually sounds like. You have been mislead for years. It looks like popular culture is coming around, though, so maybe the next generation will have the right idea when they visit here.

Then again, while southerners are portrayed more realistically in fictional TV shows, they are becoming more ridiculous in reality TV shows (Swamp People? Myrtle Manor?!). Looks like we're still screwed after all.

Monologuing

The good thing about not having much work on my book is it frees me up for other things. The housework is always done, for example. I've been cooking and baking a lot the past year. I've turned into a regular Betty Crocker! Or maybe Betty Draper is more apt- she was closer to going completely crazy. On the not-making-me-crazy side of things, though, I got to do a show recently. I haven't been on stage in such a long time! Well, it's probably only been a year, really, but it feels like forever. I did a monologue for the Bay Street Theatre's production of A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer (MMRP). They decided to shake things up this February and do that instead of The Vagina Monologues, which they've done the last few years.The show was put together by the same playwright, Eve Ensler, in 2008 or 2009, I think. Like The Vagina Monologues, performances of A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer are done to raise money for The V-Day Foundation and to support a local charity, in our case, the Rape Crisis Center. Ensler only wrote one of the monologues this time around, called "Fur is Back". For the rest, she solicited literary donations from various authors and playwrights that troupes can select from when putting the show together. Here's a picture of the theatre bedecked with the lovely poster Morgan Daniels drew for our production:

MMRP is not like a regular play, so the production was very loosely organized. We had 4 women directing a few actresses apiece and a total of  14 performers. JinHi Rand directed me in the monologue "In Memory of Imette," by Periel Aschenbrand. JinHi said she chose that piece and wanted to work with me specifically because she thinks I'm good. Maybe that's true, but I also suspect she just felt sorry for me because I've had no luck getting cast in anything lately. Well, this beggar will not be choosy!

"In Memory of Imette" is about the murder of Imette St. Guillen. I originally wasn't sure if the monologue was referencing a real event or not, so I had to look it up. I found plenty of information and, luckily, news broadcasts so I could hear how to pronounce her name correctly. She was killed in 2008, I think, in New York City. She was only 25 and attending John Jay University for her Master's Degree. She went bar-hopping with a friend one night, they parted ways, and Imette was never seen alive again. Her brutalized body was found by the side of the Belt Parkway later on.

So... yeah, I got the heavy-hearted downer monologue. The tone of the show overall is pretty heavy. Not that there were no laughs to be had, there were even a few snicker-worthy lines in my segment, but it's just very different from The Vagina Monologues. That one has some weighty material, but it's a celebratory piece at its heart. MMRP is specifically about rape and violence toward women and it's kind of hard to put an optimistic spin on that. Not putting a happy face on that problem is, in fact, the point. One night, I think it was before we went onstage for our second performance, Sheila (an actress and one of the directors) asked the group one by one to give the reason they had chosen to do this show. Out of us 14 women, I was surprised when more than half expressed a connection to the material because "something bad" had happened to themselves or a woman they knew. It was chilling to hear. It also illustrated another point of the show: abuse is not something that only happens to those women or other women. Those women are all around you and often very close to you. I must confess I was well into my 20s before it dawned on me that not having been raped, harassed, molested, or beaten put me into some kind of minority among my female peers. I felt kind of sheepish and stupid admitting to the rest of my MMRP co-stars that I was there simply because I hadn't been on stage in a while.

As is typical with non-musical dramatic material in community theatre, we had a hard time attracting an audience. My usual standard of success is when the audience outnumbers the cast, which it looked like we just managed on opening night. They were a quiet crowd too. I hate that. I hate an audience that gives you no feedback whatsoever. It's like performing to a sentient wall that you're pretty sure thinks you're an idiot. Our Saturday night audience, though, was AWESOME! It was the biggest crowd we had during our three-night run, though by no means standing room only. They actually clapped between each woman's performance and they weren't afraid to laugh at the funny bits. During Kenya's "Black Vaginas" monologue, which she delivered every night with evangelistic energy, I thought for sure she was about to get a chorus of "Amen!" and "Preach it!" from the crowd. A few people I could see from my chair looked real close to it. Sunday's audience seemed a little timid, much like the first night, but oh well. We wrapped up the show, raised some money for the Rape Crisis Center, and I was proud of my work. Also happy to have finally done something at the Bay Street Theatre.

I see so many good shows there. I hope I get to be in more. It looks like they've only got two more non-musicals planned for this season: Speech and Debate and The Santaland Diaries. Guess we'll see how my schedule looks then. If I'm working too hard to do a play, I wouldn't complain.

A Slow Ride for Slow Times

Well, 2012 was a dismal year and 2013 isn't shaping up to be any better so far. I simply cannot figure out what changed between December 2011 and January 2012 that would cause my business to collapse like the sunny side of an iceberg. The decline is especially galling in light of the fact that Visit Savannah keeps insisting tourism was up this year. It makes me wonder what their definition of "up" is. Or maybe they don't actually know what "tourism" means. My understanding is the only numbers they really have to work with are the hotel occupancy rates. More people coming to Savannah should mean more people doing tours and shopping and stuff, but that does not appear to be the case. I've heard from numerous other walking tour owners (with a few irritating exceptions) and other business owners that 2012 was a bad year. I don't know what conclusion to draw from this disparate data. How can tourism be up and down at the same time? It did occur to me that Savannah's participation in the Rock 'n Roll Marathon the last couple of years might be skewing the numbers. It brings 20,000 people to the city all at once, but they're here to run, not play. Most of them only stay overnight or for a day, then they're gone. So, there's that. Maybe the type of tourists that came to Savannah was different this year. Visit Savannah has the specifically stated goal of attracting high-caliber travelers, but perhaps their aim is off. They may have flung their nets wide and only drug in the beer-guzzling boors who stay overnight to party a bit, do a ghost tour, and leave the next afternoon. I don't know. I just don't know what happened. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though. Another tour guide acquaintance of mine let slip at the Crystal Beer Parlor one night that the Savannah Slow Ride was in desperate need of certified tour guides. I contacted one of the owners through Facebook to offer my services and Samantha was glad to accept my resume. I've ridden along on one of their daytime tours (conducted by my friend Lawrence) and one of their ghost tours (led by one of my other friends, Louis) to get the hang of things. Samantha still hasn't given me any paid work to do yet, which I hate because I need money and I needed it yesterday. Thing is, February is still the slow season even for a business that is doing better than mine. The timing is just awful. I have so many bills that come due in January and February and those are the months when I have the least money, even in a good year. I have to renew my business license, pay my car insurance, pay for my vehicle registration, pay for my website, and so on and so forth. Samantha told me they have a lot of tours on the books next weekend, but I won't be available for any nighttime work because I have a show to do at the Bay Street Theatre on the 15, 16, and 17, which I had already committed to before I ever contacted the Slow Ride. Why is all of the timing always bad?! Damn you, February! You will always be a 28-day, twisted dwarf of a month who drags his clubfoot across the calendar and makes everyone else uncomfortable! I hate you.

If  I can claw my way through the month, though, the money should be pretty good once the season hits high gear in the Spring. The Slow Ride is only entering its second year in business, but it has become very popular. The story I heard was that Samantha got the idea when she was in Milwaukee (beer, anyone?) and saw this giant bicycle thing being pedaled by all these people who were having a great time and drinking beer as they went. She got all fired up and her husband built what's called a quadricycle and they started this company. The quadricycle is like a giant table on wheels with a cover over it. There are seats along each side and the riders pedal to make the thing go. A driver at the front is in charge of steering and braking. This rattly contraption is designed to only go about 4mph at most, which I think is all wrong. The carriage horses pee on the street corners at a higher velocity. I would take off the controls so the speed of the Slow Ride was directly proportional to the number and speed of the pedalers. Then I would rename it the Savannah Thrill Ride, skip the Historic District entirely, and send the group flying down Highway 80 to the beach. Yeah.

Speed or no speed, beach or no beach, both groups I rode along with earlier this month had a really great time. I am entirely mystified, frankly. I mean, I can't figure out what makes the Slow Ride so much fun for people. As a tour, it's very, very history-lite and ghost story-lite. There's a lot of chit-chat and joking amongst the group, as well as plenty of drinks for the excursion. The tours take two hours, the guests make a few stops and get off the quadricycle at a couple of places to snack and refill their drinks. It strikes me as primarily self-generated fun. The people I rode with were already in a good mood before it began. Only the glummest of tour guides could have ruined their good time and I don't know that the chipperest of tour guides could perk up a group that was in a funk from the get-go. More than being informative, it is the guide's primary to responsibility to keep the laughs coming. It all looks deceptively easy, but there's a hidden aspect to the job: making sure the guests have a good time without getting too drunk or becoming too disruptive. That's especially hard on the ghost tours. People tend to get extra rowdy and be a little too liberal with their drinking when they're out after dark.

Whatever. I just need something to keep me afloat until I can figure out how to get my own business back on track. I have an appointment at the Small Business Resource Center tomorrow afternoon. Samantha told me they were very helpful to her. I wonder if they can tell me where all the classy people who want to do private tours have gone. Where did you go, romantic couples and well-heeled retirees? How do I find you?

A night at The Jinx with Superhorse, an Evening with Legs McNeil

Yeah, it's been too long since my last post. I know that. Whatchu gonna do about it, huh? Huh?! I do have one or two good excuses on top of my usual laziness: family emergency and then the computer died. Don and I had to replace the hard drive. Work is slow, but I've been trying to fill my days with interesting things. I spent the night of Saturday, January 5th doing something I've never done before: working for a band! The band in question is a local group called Superhorse, often referred to as a "superband," though I'm not sure if that's a comment on the quality of their music or the unwieldy seven man lineup. I'm friends with the drummer, Jim- the same Jim who runs the Psychotronic Film Society. So, there's one drummer, one keyboardist, one bassist, and... four guitars? One of them belongs to the lead singer, though, and he doesn't play on every song, so I guess sometimes it's just three guitars. You can read a good write-up about the band in this Connect Savannah article. You can listen to a selection of their music here.

So, I knew Superhorse was gonna be playing The Jinx that Saturday, but I didn't plan on going because I'm too poor to pay a cover charge and I'm more devoted to local theatre than live music and the music's always too loud for me anyway and blah blah blah, but then Jim put out an APB on Facebook for someone to work the band's merchandise table. Don and I had just seen The Hobbit a few days before, so I kind of had a Bilbo Baggins moment and decided I would volunteer myself for a night of adventure. I guess that would make Jim... Gandalf? And the other band members would be a company of six doughty dwarfs on a quest to, um.... eh, that analogy got away from me. Anyway, Jim was glad to have someone he knew in charge of the money, plus my handy dandy iPhone with the handy dandy Paypal Here app would make it possible for them to accept payments other than cash. No one in the band has a smartphone, so it has to be all cash all the time whenever Superhorse plays. You'd think out of seven guys, statistics would favor one of them having acquired a smartphone by now. And anything that makes it easier for people to give you money is a good thing. Jim said they didn't usually sell a whole lot, though, so no one worried about it much.

The music wasn't even set to start until about 10, so I arrived at The Jinx around 9:30. Knew it was gonna be a late, late night, but hey, sleeping in is what Sundays are for! The Jinx is a fixture among live music venues in town, but I had never been to the place. I took some pictures before it filled up and during the performance, which you can see on my Pinterest right here: Bonnie Blue Tours Pinterest- Downtown Events and Venues. I also just added a couple of new shots from last night's outing to the Bay Street Theatre to hear Legs McNeil read from his book Please Kill Me as well as his newest book, soon to be published yet still untitled. More on that later.

Jim set me up with Superhorse merchandise: t-shirts, a special edition poster, their first album (rock) and their (sort of country) EP, and chocolate chip cookies. The cookies were there basically because Jim had joked with someone about selling cookies at the show, so he actually brought some to sell at $1 for a bag of two. Or at least sell the ones he didn't go ahead and scarf down. Cookies and beer, the dinner of champions! Jim also brought a jar of earplugs to sell for $1 a pair, which strikes me as somehow genius, considerate, and cynical all at the same time. I had the good sense to bring my own earplugs from home. I'm not very experienced at this "going to clubs and listening to live bands" thing, but I'm no fool either.

I set up like a good little merchandise girl, folding and stacking the t-shirts just like I used to do when I worked cash and retail at Cracker Barrel, oh, so many years ago. There were two different shirt designs and Jim had me clip one of each, along with a few bags of cookies, to the suspended section of chain-link fence that served for display. The Jinx is that kind place. The decorating scheme abounded with bats and skulls, the bartender looked like the only thing longer than his beard was his rap sheet, and every hand had a PBR Tallboy in it before the end of the night. My base of operations was in the back corner to the left of the door as you walk in. The floor rises up a couple steps and there are some booths and tables along that wall. The rise on the left side coupled with the bar on the right side creates a kind of canyon in the middle of the club that pushes all the people toward the stage like a human waterfall crashing down onto a drum kit. Funny thing about those booths- the tables are actually old arcade games. Working ones! My merchandise table was Frogger and I think the people one booth over from me were sitting down with Mrs. Pac Man.

The opening act was supposed to be a San Francisco group called Whiskey Pills Fiasco, but they missed their flight so Superhorse had to scramble. That's why the show started late. Luckily, local band Bottles & Cans was just finishing up a set somewhere else and didn't mind racing down the street, picking up Superhorse's instruments, and playing a bit to warm up the audience. As I once explained to a friend, I can hear the difference between good music and bad music, but I can rarely tell the difference between good music and great music. Jim sat down with a beer and assured me that Bottles & Cans is really good. He said their guy plays the drums better than he does, but it's not like I would ever know the difference. The music sounded good enough to me, especially once I put in my earplugs. It's nice to have that "listening from across the street outside" sensation while being able to remain in the room. Bottles & Cans are kind of blues-rock-ish or something. Their singer sounded a lot like Louis Armstrong with some extra handfuls of gravel in his throat. The audience swelled and swelled and swelled and loads of people I knew showed up. Hm, when and how did I ever become so connected? Sales were actually quite brisk, especially the earplugs. Those sold like hotcakes, though there was still no shortage of people out on the floor who seemed to think a live music experience wasn't complete unless you left with a hearing impairment.

I had the presence of mind to shoot a little video with my phone. I still forget about all the things an iPhone can do. I caught most of Superhorse's first number (minus the opening verses), which you can view here: Superhorse- Shadows and Shapes. That's the video of it I posted to Superhorse's Facebook. I tried to upload the thing from my phone to the computer, but stupid Windows Media Player kept playing the video upside down! What is wrong with you, Windows? And now with the new hard drive and re-installation of Windows, the Media Player says it doesn't recognize the format (.mov) at all. Ugh, seriously Microsoft, how did you become the only game in town? Here's a second video I took later in the night: Superhorse- Joyride. I got cut off because of this guy who was trying to get my attention. I thought he wanted to buy something; turned out he was just asking if he could fold up his jacket and leave it with me.

That was another quirky development of the evening: my little space became Coat-Check Corner. I think it was JinHi who started it when she asked if she could leave her jacket there with me. Then she bought a t-shirt and I stashed that for her too. Then Jamie bought a poster, but didn't want it to get creased up, so I hid that for her in the box behind me until she came back for it at the end of the night. Then Mandy came in and asked if I would hold on to her coat too and, Jesus, I think I had a whole department store's worth of outerwear tucked into the booth with me by the time the show ended! I guess once everyone I knew had put me in charge of their clothing, I should not have been surprised when strangers began to follow suit. The guy who interrupted my filming process was a nice young man in a button-up shirt who thoughtfully offered to share his shrooms with me when he discreetly pulled the baggie out of his jacket pocket. I politely declined.

So, a good time was had by all and a very good time was had by some. The band made out better than usual in terms of merchandise. Plenty of the sales were cash, but having the use of my phone did nab about $90 the guys would have missed otherwise. They sold around $300 worth of stuff all in all, which Jim told me that was three times what they usually sell. He thought it was because a lot of new people came to see the band that night, but I noticed more than a few familiar faces at my table. Plenty of friends and acquaintances bought stuff just because they like Jim and wanted to be supportive. He has the novel effect on people of making them want to give him money, while also having the misfortune of knowing only a bunch of penniless losers such as myself. He'd be all set if he'd start hanging around with a more well-heeled crowd. I finished up the night by going all middle-school and having Jim write his PayPal ID on my arm so I could transfer the band's money to him from my account. I was traveling light and hadn't bothered to carry my purse, so I was bereft of things to write on and things to write with.

I snagged a cheap hot dog from Sweet Melissa's on my way back to the car. They make a killing being the only place open after the bars close down. I got bumped into by some drunk guy, kidded around with by some other drunk guy, and finally got home and made it into bed sometime after 3am, I think.

My little excursion to the Bay Street Theatre last night was also rock 'n roll, but less drunk and noisy. Jim runs an organization called Knocked Out Loaded through which he promotes live music and other music-centric stuff. He snagged Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain for a stop in Savannah to answer questions and read excerpts from Please Kill Me! The Uncensored History of Punk as well as from McNeil's newest book, which he hasn't even given a title to yet. I know exactly squat about the history of American music, rock music, or punk rock, but even I still know that sitting in a room talking with Legs McNeil about The Ramones and Iggy Pop is totally cool. In case you don't know, Legs McNeil is the guy who started Punk Magazine back in the 70s and is credited with giving the genre its name. He hung out at CBGB's night after night with people and bands who are the stuff of legend now. I still wasn't going to go because I'm not that much of a fan girl and, as usual, I'm poor and didn't have $10 to spare for a ticket. But Jim came through again with the need for someone to sell merchandise, just some special posters he'd had made, and offered me the job. So, I got to enjoy the reading after all.

This January was bookended by serious rock 'n roll submersion, which surprises me. I'm not sure how that happened. I think I was minding my own business and got sucked into this punk rock vortex. I mean, Jim showed the movie Rock 'n Roll High School last summer, then CBGB filmed here, then I heard Superhorse play for the first time (and got to take home each of their cds for working the merch table!), then Legs McNeil came to town. What's next? Whatever it is, I hope it involves Alan Rickman filming another movie here.