Savannah's Historic Suburbs An Architectural and Urban Tour

I'm dr. Robin Williams and for today's tour we're going to explore the evolution of savannah's historic suburbs and suburban houses as with other cities savannah saw city limits expand outwards as new transportation technology and changing social values encouraged the creation of new residential districts by tracing the development of suburbs from the early streetcar suburbs of the second half of the nineteenth century through the first automobile suburbs of early twentieth century and finally the sprawling post-world War two suburbs we can see how the desire for greenery privacy and increased emphasis on architectural in develop individuality shaped both the urban form of suburbs and the size form and style of the houses in that and how these changed over time one of the other factors in motivating people to move to the suburbs was a shift in social priorities instead of the formality of living in the urban center where your house is right up to the sidewalk the suburbs offered a more relaxed lifestyle the ability to be comfortable like I am on this stepping stone is sort of breaking down of the social formality of the urban center by the mid 19th century industrialization have made American cities not only bigger and more prosperous but also noisier dirtier and more congested and for those who could afford it living outside the city center was a highly desirable proposition the development of streetcar lines between the 1860s and the 1880s in most cities allowed people to move farther away from the city center being able to cover in the same mad time that they could have walked a few blocks as a pedestrian they can now cover much more ground riding a streetcar which meant they could live farther from the city center and enjoy more privacy a healthier greener living environment more land and for the first time things like private Gardens a little more space around their homes and so let's explore how the suburbs evolve starting in the mid 19th century with the streetcar summer one of the important differences of having a house outside of the downtown core in these early streetcar suburbs was that you could have a front yard something that before was reserved for the absolute most elite residence in Savannah that'd be the wealthy people on their trust law mansions such as the Owens Thomas house has a small front yard but otherwise even middle-class people couldn't afford that kind of luxury but in suburbs this becomes available for an increasing range of society such as here at Smithfield cottage a middle class and a business men's house on West Hall Street just west of Forsyth Park we can see that the house is set back it has a lovely little fence a fence is a very typical characteristic of a Victorian suburb fencing in a small really a postage stamp-sized front yard and then the house has a generous porch on it that we'll explore in a minute but from the yard if we pan to the right we can see how the land Gabe is generous wide sidewalk big tree lawn very wide street so there's a great emphasis on the green space of the suburb a common characteristic of suburban houses in the late 19th century would be generous front porches and as you can see by the rocking chairs over there to the right the idea was to relax on your porch and enjoy the birds chirping the breeze blowing around it's distinctly quieter out here in the suburbs and we're close to Forsyth Park so you could just loose wander a block or two over and enjoy the beautiful bucolic green space that was so abundant out here and so the idea of living on your porch its cervix an outdoor room becomes important aspect of later 19th century characteristic of these early suburbs one of the advantages of having a house detached from its neighbors in other words being a free-standing house was that it allowed the builders or architects designing these houses to take advantage of their three-dimensional form with styles that emphasize a much more sculptural effect one of the most popular styles was the Queen Anne and here we see a wonderful example of it smithfield cottage from the 1880s illustrates some of the key characteristics of this very relaxed and informal style with its prominent gable at the top and a smaller gable down here on the porch you can just see off to the right and there's no attempt at symmetry in fact this house emphasizes irregularity and has features on one side that are not matched by the other in fact as we go round the house we'll see features off the west and east facades that don't mirror one another rather the asymmetry is a kind of architectural expression of the same informality that is saw in the sort of lifestyle of living in the suburbs the prominent front gable surmounting the second floor also illustrates that English quality of sort of late medieval half I kind of carry over from English vernacular architecture that was so popular within the Queen Anne and other vernacular based styles of the residential styles of the 19th century but what's interesting Smithfield is that the areas in between the dark stained would show little seashells possibly a recognition of the proximity of Savannah to the coast giving a little craftsman like individuality to the stucco in between those pieces of wood craftsmanship was an important part of the Queen Anne style and we can see the stained glass windows here with the kind of milky late 19th century stained glass it's not representational art it's just decorative stained glass is an important aspect of the residential experience by the time we get to the late 19th century and in fact we can see some stained glass through the front window on the porch we can see one of the East windows illuminated back there in the background one of the characteristics of the Queen and style house was that as you pass through those front doors you enter into an entrance hall that is more than just the narrow passage of the old center hall houses like we've seen in the past with the Owens Thomas house and Davenport house rather there was a house with furniture a fireplace and the staircase leading upstairs rather than being at the back of the house is moved right to the front in fact you can see the landing of the staircase projecting out through the facade giving this building a really distinct individual character in fact individualism or in visuality becomes a hallmark of the suburbs to give the opportunity for homeowners to really carve out their own identity the entrance hall being a kind of living space eventually becomes known as the living hall and it's from the entrance hall in houses like this that the living room of the 20th century would be born as parlors and drawing rooms are replaced by living rooms and dens these rooms that are better suited to the lifestyle of the 20th century so having lots of Gables sticking out on different sides as well as bay windows the polygonal bay that you can see down here at the bottom of the frame our characteristics of Queen Anne and allowed it to have a much more sculptural effect of course the Gables evoked the idea of a house the gable is a classic symbol of a residential form going back to how we even think about houses as children as a triangle on top of a square or a box another feature that children almost always draw when they're drawing a house is a chimney and prominent chimneys are characteristic of Queen Anne style houses as you can see in this view of the Eastside of Smithfield cottage a view of the west side of the house shows us more chimneys another gable with a little porch and immense brackets holding up the porch and a little view of the unique dormer with its polygonal pyramidal roof on the front facade so again each facade is treated differently giving it an individuality taking advantage of that sculptural freedom that free-standing house provides a designer another popular style in the Victorian suburbs these early streetcar suburbs is the Italianate as you can see it likewise has kind of irregular massing meaning it's got pieces sticking out on all three sides or four sides really to take advantage of its freestanding or detached character but the Italianate did it with polygamy bays these serve bay window like forms that extend as you can see on the east facade to the right facing barnard and on the front facing hall street rising the full height of the building and meeting the other distinguishing characteristic of the Italianate which is that prominent cornice held up by paired brackets and that is true across the style whether simple or elaborate like this these and it features will show up again and again in the summer we can also see on this house how it has a fence although it's a really kind of token little fence but it defines that private realm the street line where houses used to come out to that line now the house sits back and has this tiny little green space in front but it's once again that idea of the front yard and holding the old street line is now a fence even when it's really small a third style popular in the later 19th century suburbs was the Colonial Revival characterized by a center hall symmetrical organization and evoking the kind of architectural patterns of the colonial era of America this became very popular especially after 1876 with the celebration of centennial in the World's Fair in Philadelphia where buildings like this were erected as pavilions and reliefs helped popularize this style for a broader public the house appears to borrow its overall composition from one of the most famous Colonial Revival houses of the late 19th century the H a/c Taylor house in Newport Rhode Island designed by the prominent New York architecture firm of McKim Mead and white particularly in terms of its central arched window tribble dormers and porch with clustered ionic columns as you can see the houses we've been looking at in the suburbs are not small houses so the early suburbs attracted upper middle class and wealthy downtown people to move out to these early suburbs and enjoy really large pieces of property that the ultra-rich previously could only have afforded inside the city but nonetheless you can see that there's a tension to detail here on this house it's really quite fine and remarkable the bay projecting off the right-hand side for example has really elegant Renaissance classical details and the plaster moldings above the window and up in the cornice another remarkable detail that gives this house its its individuality is this graduate it's collaborating on the side here and you can see that each clobbered or clapboard is a little bit bigger as it goes up the facade and this is a feature that is authentic back to the 18th century and it's most likely that in that time the lowest boards would weather the most so overlapping them more gave them more substance and and the ability to resist draw better but here it becomes a decorative feature and it illustrates an attention to craftsmanship and it's just a nice effort to make the house seem more luxurious and where that the workmanship of the carpenters can be appreciated even that graduated collaborating appears to have been borrowed from the h AC Taylor house so here are a couple more Queen Anne style houses that show some of the characteristics typical of this style most notably the corner turret both of these homes not as grand as the ones we were just looking at but nonetheless still separated from one another even if it's by a modest amount of space we could also see that they're slightly pulled back from the curb with a little knee wall defining the edge of the property a tiny tiny little yard but also we have porches and sculptural 3-dimensional quality on these houses so the characteristics of the Queen end whether on a very large house or a relatively small one like these shows this fascination with the three-dimensional sculptural and asymmetrical form also these ones evoke a kind of more vertical townhouse light quality so as we move through the suburbs we're going to see this kind of verticality give way increasingly to lower and wider houses as we drive south on Barnard Street we see how Savannah's early streetcar suburbs of the Victorian district and the Thomas Square neighborhood beyond it continue the urban pattern of grid Planning and mostly detached wooden houses in Queen Anne an Italian a styles the development of automobiles suburbs in the early 20th century coincided with the desire for neighborhoods that were more exclusive the local developers Harry Hayes and William Larmore developed Ardsley Park and their colleague Harvey Granger developed Chatham Crescent two contiguous neighborhoods that would cater to whites only and the way that they would do this is through racial covenants built into the deed of the property that the property could only be sold to white people to reinforce the exclusive nature of these neighborhoods stone gates with terracotta roofs like this one this pair at the corner of bull and Washington mark the entrances to the neighborhood and were in a sense the physical equivalents to the covenants although these gates didn't have actual gates closing off the neighborhood they were nonetheless symbolic of a sense of a boundary as we enter our sleep arc along its principal east-west Street Washington Avenue we see the impact of the city beautiful movement of the early 20th century and its emphasis on enhanced landscaping the street has a median similar to Oglethorpe Avenue and Liberty Street in downtown but now with three rows of live oak trees creating a double la with the outer rows planted in tree lawns here we are at the key intersection central intersection of the arsy Park neighborhood Abercorn runs down the middle of the neighborhood north to south and Washington Avenue originally called 47th Street was its main east-west broad palatial Avenue with a median that we'll be looking at here we find the home of one of the two developers of the neighborhood the home of Harry Kay's latter more and clearly he was trying to set a standard for the neighborhood with this palatial home of his it was erected in 1910 the same year as the neighborhood itself and it employed a Bozarth classical style kind of style we usually associate with public buildings of this era and not so much with houses it's not exactly very residential looking home with its monumental Corinthian columns elaborate classical cornice broad entry staircase more typical of a public building and a fantastic entry center hall plan with elaborate door that we'll look at in more detail so this building with it oh and it has buff brick the same color brick you'd find on civic buildings like the Civic Center and commercial buildings of the day so not typical of residential architecture but clearly setting a standard for the kind of wealth and affluence that he wanted to have attracted to this neighborhood if we look in closer we can see this incredibly generous center hall entrance piece with white door and broad side lights an enormous fan light above made out of leaded glass and through that leaded glass you might be able to make out the electric bulbs that are illuminated on the underside of an overhang inside the entrance hall which has a grand spiral staircase that greets you upon entry directly across the street from the Latimer house is this handsome mansion designed in the Tudor Revival style as one can see with its steeply pitched roofs slate roof shingles prominent central chimney that even includes a little gothic style beyond the stack of the chimney crowning the entrance and the polygamy to the left we can see these castle ated features these battlements or crenellations the entry itself has a gothic slightly gothic pointed entry arch and all the windows have are called hood moldings which are typical of medieval and Tudor architecture so you might ask why was the Tudor Revival so popular well obviously for people with money it evoked associations with the English aristocracy and the kind of old money that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and so as a result the Tudor Revival is among the more popular styles of the early twentieth-century suburbs to make the neighborhood more attractive the Lattimore brothers incorporated generous landscaping such as the square behind me and multiple others there were feature from downtown Savannah familiar to some aliens except now they've been pushed off to the side so Abercorn which runs right behind us here the traffic going by as allowed to slide by unempioyed well the squares are set off whereas downtown the squares interrupt the flow of traffic and force cars to slow down so this was a concession to the automobile as part of their landscaping it gave an amenity a beautiful square that kavanah park here and these are set back and forth on either side of a procore as you go south through the neighborhood another feature that we'll see are the medians that divide both Abercorn and Washington avenues and our classic example of the impact of the city beautiful movement on the Ardsley Park neighborhood as we drive east on 45th Street we can see the generous median on our left on how an artist Lee park the outer rows of live oak trees are planted in the tree lawns the narrow strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk but as we cross Habersham street we enter the Chatham Crescent development almost imperceptibly the only clue being a subtle change in the landscaping gone are the tree lawns and the outer trees are now planted in the front lawns of properties as we approach the center of the neighborhood we see the large Savannah Arts Academy High School come into view originally developer Harvey Granger had planned the central site for a hotel the hotel Georgia what he confidently boasted would be the finest tourist Hotel on the Atlantic coast it's Spanish Colonial Revival style evokes the resort hotels erected by Henry Flagler in Florida in the late 19th century construction however only got to the first floor when it was stopped in 1914 according to a Sam Born fire insurance map in 1935 the Board of Education acquired the site for Savannah high school designed by a team of local architects to accommodate 2,000 students it was the largest Public Works Administration or PWA project in Georgia and the largest high school in the state it's Georgian Revival style was popular for schools in the early 20th century as we drive a little further east on Washington Avenue we turn left onto Atlantic Avenue which between Washington and 46th Street forms a small Crescent that frames Tiedemann Park that fronts the high school so here we are on the Atlantic Mall the heart of the Chatham Crescent neighborhood laid out by Harvey Granger in 1910 so this neighborhood reflects the principles of the city beautiful movement with this strong axis running down the center of the neighborhood aligning with a major site in the distance they're now occupied by the Savannah Arts Academy but Granger had in mind for that site was the Georgia Hotel which we'll discuss in view of the high school in just a moment but let's think about this landscape the Atlantic mall is this broad swath of green with Atlantic Avenue separated into two carriage drives one to the left one to the right that flanked this broad green space which is a favorite place for people to stroll walk their dogs take kids for a walk and for others to just get some fresh air the mall is defined by these two rows of Palmetto trees which followed the design of landscape architect Darlene Jones who work for Grainger to come up with a landscape plan for the neighborhood so not only do we have Paul Meadows on the Atlantic Mall creating this unusual ballet unique in Savannah but he also had them planted on a still Avenue what's now known as Victory Drive in the same year 1910 from Victory Drive we can see the full length of this Palmetto la and behind me are these concrete pedestals and steps and the pedestals originally held these elegant flights and it'd be amazing if at some point they can be restored to reinvigorate this crosswalk here as a pedestrian node a place where people could enjoy the full length of the Atlantic mall one of the most prominent houses on the Atlantic mall is the Robert hitch house erected in 1910 and designed by Savannah architect Hyman rickover who's more familiar to us as the architect of City Hall Robert hitch was a prominent lawyer at the time and would later be the mayor of Seville so we can see that this neighborhood attracted the movers and shakers of Savannah who were really you know the among the more affluent members of society and desired a place of prominence and this house does just that it's right here at the corner of Atlantic mall and Victory Drive which was probably a lot quieter back then that it is today the house is a Mediterranean Revival style as we can see with its stucco facade stone trim with some elegant spanish-style details and the red terracotta roof one of the more interesting aspects of this it reminds us that this is an automobile suburb is the Porte cochere that's off to the right built in as part of the design in fact many of the homes the larger homes in this area had built in car ports for the formal French term Porte cochere one of the characteristics and early 20th century suburbs is the amazing architectural individuality and stylistic variety of the homes in these neighborhoods and behind me you can see a great example of a Craftsman style home which is really a style more typical of working-class bungalows small modest homes but this one is really an architectural tour de force of the Craftsman style we can see it has the irregular massing with pieces sticking out on all sides and which is typical of the style showing you know gable fronted and Gables on the sides but probably the key characteristic of the craftsman is how the different building components from the rafter tails the rafters of the roof stick out at the bottom along the edge of each roof and the beam and brackets painted a reddish color here it's always as if the owners have painted it to make it diagrammatic so we could say okay look at all the red parts those are brackets extruded out from the house to help hold up the roof or in the porch area the porch itself has the typical battered piers very characteristic and really my favorite feature is the variety of Windows there isn't a standard window on this house they're elongated they're they're stretched they're exaggerated and the really the showstopper is the door the door is the widest door I think I've seen on a house in this neighborhood and it's a wonderful example of how everything is individualized and given its kind of craftsman character much more typical of early 20th century suburbs our Colonial Revival homes with their standard center hall plan in this case that kind of Colonial Revival evoking the mid-atlantic Virginia colonialism and the red brick went and that distinctive white trim especially around the door with that curling eighteenth century style Chippendale or split pediment so a house like this would be representative of people who were more conservative and more conveying the idea of an establishment identity and because many of the people who came to suburbs like this had had certain level of affluence Colonial Revival homes with their symmetry and orderliness were very very popular as we drive down East 45th Street we can see the emphasis on individuality through the notable stylistic variety of the houses carrying on with the theme of architectural variety and individuality is this wonderful Mediterranean Revival house on East 45th Street near waters and it displays the characteristics of the Mediterranean Revival most distinctively with this red terracotta roof its roughcast stucco the kind of broadening tower quality that evokes almost like a mission a Spanish mission or a rural Church where the tower flares out you can see right here with this almost buttress defect and the iron railing and even the awning with its spear-like holders and then the entrance with this round arch at the top of the tower over the entrance of the house we can see key characteristics the tile work set within the stucco the rough stucco itself and most distinctively those wooden piers or columns with their broad but flat capitals evocative of the American Southwest and the Spanish mission architecture places like Santa Fe continuing eastward on 45th Street we encounter one of the four round squares in Chatham Crescent this one called Thea's Park where it intersects with the large curving Chatham Crescent Road seen on the right as an automobile suburb these squares were made circular to facilitate the easier movement of cars having traveled halfway around the circle we can return to 45th Street and approach the eastern boundary of the Chatham Crescent neighborhood where it meets waters Avenue and Daffin Park at this intersection something surprising can be found but one of the most exciting things to survive in this neighborhood in fact I think it's the only one sized in the city is this embedded stop sign that predates the octagonal sock signs that we're so used to in our world this one is a cast metal stop sign you can make out the word stop and just above the word there are these little brown reflectors so come on in close and take a look at this as I say it's unique in the city and it has the reflectors here and the stop and it reminds us of how slow the traffic must be going back in the day that they could even see this and respond to it and that it would actually be functional after crossing waters Avenue we entered a fan park which was created by the city of Savannah in 1907 to provide citizens with much-needed green space and athletic facilities originally called da phonetic park it was named after P D davon the founding director of the city's park entry department who was largely responsible for the establishment of a city's current tree canopy in the 1890s and who advocated for the creation of this large 80 acre park the landscape architect here john nolen who was trained at harvard and was the first one of the early landscape architects in america so he was hired his first job out of harvard was being hired by the city of Savannah to design Daffin Park and he brought a kind of Bo's our classical urban planning I deal with this central axis running down the park and very open fields on the north and south that were flexible for different athletic uses running down the center of the park is this grand four rows of live oak trees that were laid out in this really impressive la not unlike the medians in downtown Savannah like Olivera Avenue and Liberty Street but on a much greater scale what's interesting about the trees here is that the majority of them were brought in from Ossabaw Island so PD davon was the parquetry deduct director at the time and to help accelerate the greening up this of the park they brought in relatively mature live oaks and transplanted them a really heroic feat that made the park what it is today and the live oaks are its defining characteristic along the southern part of the park is this vast open field that has served many different kinds of athletic functions over the years from football and rugby and soccer and baseball different fields have been set up over the years and among the kind of activities of the early 20th century that took advantage of this was actually that this field served as an aerodrome as a place for airplanes to land not long after the park was set up a use that however was not continued just beyond you can see on the far side of this field you can see houses and trees and that is the neighborhood of Parkside and we'll be visiting that momentarily that developed a few years after Ardsley Park and Chatham Crescent a much skinnier Washington Avenue skirts the southern edge of Daffin Park and fronts the largest homes in the Parkside neighborhood turning on to Live Oak Street we enter this early twentieth-century streetcar suburb then Parkside the bigger homes are typically American Foursquare and the American Foursquare is one of the most popular housing forms in the early 20th century from roughly about 1910 to 1925 and this was a house that was basically very efficient it was a box often fronted by a porch like this one and you a door off to one side so it's kind of a variation on the side hall plan and the inside is really efficiently laid out with a front-hall front living room dining room and behind the hall of the kitchen and then an array of bedrooms upstairs off a small hallway so sometimes support is only on the front and what's fun on this street here on 48 is that the neighboring house shows us a nice variation of a four square right next door is another American poorest square equally boxy but this time with a wraparound porch that extends across the full front of the house and about halfway down the side and it reminds us just how important was the outdoor living space to these houses in the late nineteen teens and around 1920 American four squares were enormous ly popular in the American suburbs and they remark it mainly through catalogs you could buy the plans for a house like this through Sears for example they marketed all sorts of houses for squares being among their most popular but also they marketed working-class or smaller bungalows especially Craftsman bungalows the most common house form throughout Parkside is the bungalow the one-story broad modest home that was affordable for working-class people one of the favorite architectural styles of the time was the craftsman and so together they're known as the Craftsman bungalow so what makes this a Craftsman style home well it has the most predominant feature are the exaggerated brackets that you can see holding up the roof which extends out in a an exaggerated fashion so taking features and making them more pronounced to emphasize the craftsmanship be it the carpentry the shingling on the side or off to the left we can see a chimney mass that's been brought outside and has a rough cast stucco to emphasize a different kind of craftsmanship so these houses were affordable they were modest but they were very efficient on the inside and they they often as I mentioned with the American Foursquare they were often marketed through catalogues like Sears so this may well be a Sears catalog home and these all were and these were very very popular between in the 19-teens and 1920s as we turn right on 49th Street we can see more of the craftsman bungalows that predominate in this neighborhood heading west we cross back into Chatham Crescent and see how the East End of this development filled in with many houses erected after World War Two and now made of brick passing behind the Savannah Arts Academy we can appreciate its enormous size continuing west we can see that Chatham Crescent also saw its share of craftsman bungalows nestled among residential streets the 49th Street School now the Charles Ellis Montessori Academy erected in 1929 showcases the popular Georgian Revival style at Habersham Street we encountered the boundary between Chatham crescent and Ardsley Park neighborhoods and as we head south we gradually move forward in time as early 20th century architectural styles give way to mid-century minimal traditional brick homes just over a half mile to the south we encounter the Havisham Village Shopping Center a 1950s era strip mall another key characteristic of the suburbs is the neighborhood strip hall and this is where people who lived in surrounding areas would come to shop rather than going to a traditional corner store or a downtown market so strip malls like Havisham Village here on Habersham in the 60s so well south to downtown Savannah in the midst of the 1950s and 60s suburbs are rows of stores on both sides and you can see it's a long low retail strip where you can drive right up through the front of the and of course there's ample parking there's a large parking lot right in front of me here strip malls like this were typically anchored by a grocery store such as red and white off to the left and a variety of service retailers such as dry cleaners a post office and a good variety of restaurants and shops and of course a gas station catering to the all-important automobile in 1952 neighborhoods were established just outside the city limits Kensington Park and across waters Avenue fairway Oaks and these two neighborhoods would follow the pattern of post-war suburbs with their informal wine D Street plans another interesting characteristic is both have these very traditional entrance gates that use Savannah gray bricks and these marble panels using a very traditional font while Kensington Park is typical of post-war subdivisions in having an irregular curving road network it is quite unusual in continuing the older tradition of formal street planting with rows of live oaks creating the familiar la effect a defining characteristic of Savannah's urban landscaping identity the development is also a typical in having sidewalks which were mostly abandoned in car oriented site suburbs after the war in Kensington Park almost all the houses are ranches meaning they're extended out their bungalows but they're extended out even wider than the bungalows of the early 20th century and these are often called ranch-style bungalows but calling this a style is a bit of a misnomer because the ranches can come in minimal traditional forms like these ones with their hipped roofs and suggestions of gables and essentially a watered down version of traditional residential features but they can also come in highly modernistic forms as we'll see in some nearby developments after World War Two generous amount of space in these neighborhoods with large lots large front yards allowed people to spread out and this is an idea that starts in the beginning of the 20th century with Frank Lloyd Wright and his Prairie houses where he wanted the houses to respond to the flat open space of the suburbs and so that idea after about 50 years becomes widely popular and so people will leave downtown come to the suburbs like Kensington Park and take up residence we're cutting grass barbecuing spending time with your neighbors all in a relatively quiet neighborhood compared to the hustle and bustle of the urban life downtown another distinctive feature of many of the subdivisions in suburban Savannah was the use of Savannah grey brick as a cladding material whether it's on just part of the facade or the whole facade whether they're minimal traditional houses like these or even highly modernistic ones the mid-century Mons they all made many of them made use of Savannah grey brick now it's a local brick a soft porous brick but these are salvaged these are salvaged bricks from demolished buildings in downtown Savannah in fact the harvesting of bricks from downtown in the 1950s and 60s was sometimes the reasons why a building would be torn down and so downtown was essentially like a quarry and Savannah Gray's ended up on many houses and other buildings in the suburbs and the use of the Savannah grey bricks evidently was a kind of nostalgia for the Old South not far from the Kensington Park subdivision here on the north side dren on a street called Brandywine we can find two of the great mid-century modern houses of post-war Savannah behind me is 109 Brandywine designed in 1950 by Helfrich Grantham and Ritzer and it is probably the most horizontally exaggerated house the mid-century modern houses in Savannah it's a wonderful essay in the post-war ranch form exaggerating horizontality with its flat roof and extended profile although it counteracts that with some pointed verticals the board-and-batten siding that you can see as well as that chimney stack of Tennessee quartzite a popular material in the 1950s the entrance off to the left is actually pretty shallow before you hit a series of glass walls that open up and allow you to see the wooded lot beyond so this is a house that really turns its back on the street typical the 1950s and it's really opened more into the yard beyond and it's emphasizing privacy as you can see with the clerestory ribbon windows these skinny little sets of windows that are above eye level and would admit light but no sense of prying eyes coming and if you follow me we'll look at the house next door at 111 Brandywine Daniel Grantham one of the co designers of the house we're just seeing designed a house for himself in 1956 which follows a lot of the same mid-century modern ideals of a horizontal ranch that extends across the landscape and here we see different palette of materials the expose red brick which extends beyond the facade of the house off to the right to form a garden wall we see a patch of board-and-batten in the middle same material we saw on 109 and then off to the north end of the house off to the left here is a built-in carport where the roof extends beyond the house it's probably a bit dark back there right now but there is a carport built in space for the car with the driveway very typical of mid-century 1950s architecture we're accommodating the automobile is built into the design part of the excitement of this house though is as you approach the entrance the drama of entry is heightened by there being a little koi pond that's outside the front window there and the pond extends under the rent window into the house and the kitchen which would historically have been at the back of the house has now been brought forward and those windows on the facade off to the right there are the kitchen overlooking Brandywine allowing the living room face backwards like its neighbor towards the large yard in behind all of these design strategies to emphasize privacy also very typical of the post-war suburbs was the informality of the planting we still have that idea of green space except now people's houses are polish are pushed way back to create this big open lawn in front enhancing the privacy by increasing the distance from the curb to the house but also the front yard to people's houses are no longer defined by a regular march of street trees even ttyn Park had that as a unusual characteristic for a postal or suburb but here on Brandywine this is very typical open front lawns with individual planting and going back to that theme of individuality not only was it in terms of the houses but how people landscape their yards was also up to them although the lawn was the classic feature of the front of a house one of the advantages of having a house in the suburbs is that you could have a residential lot that was enormous that allowed you to spread out across the landscape and few do it with more spectacular panache than the Richard Lane house from 1962 at the corner of Abercorn and 65th arguably the grandest mid-century modern home in Savannah is the Richard Lane home from 1962 designed by Carl Helfrich of that same firm we heard about from the 1950s this home is an essay in horizontality once again but here helfrich uses cantilever in both the ground floor that you can see from the left-hand and all the way over to the right hand corner the main living floors up off the ground and extends out above that stone base and then a running bond of long broad 10 glazed bricks emphasized horizontality even further and a mem in a manner reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright in his Prairie homes and like Frank Lloyd Wright there's a strong Japanese inflection on this house so the abstract patterning of the windows and the sort of eastern elements sprinkled into the design and the landscape and even the the dragon motif and the door handles so this house provides a sense of the luxury and of course it takes it back enormous lot and in a moment we'll take a closer look at some of its details here we see the richard lane house on its Abercorn side so it's a very generous corner lot that takes full advantage of its location allowing the driveway to enter in off Abercorn into this built-in carport area and garage beyond that to the right and from here we can see the entrance leads to a courtyard where the sunlight is passing through the stained glass the abstract pattern of stained glass windows well the very interesting things about this house is that it has a courtyard in the middle with glass walls on all sides and this concludes our tour of the Savannah suburbs from the Victorian district near downtown to the sprawling post-war subdivision south of victory Drive we've seen how changing social priorities for a desire for green space and quiet privacy have led to this move away from the city center and to have more and more property and the ability to spread out as these shifts have had a result on how houses are designed moving from the more upright and vertical houses near downtown though detached increasingly moving apart to this broader form an interesting thing is happening though at present as people rediscover the city center the suburbs are going to potentially face a different future what will come of them as the large amounts of land become more and more of a challenge to sustain but that is a different story you

Channel: Urban Traces

Views: 33,349

Keywords: Savannah architecture, Savannah, Classical architecture, civic architecture, Beaux-Arts Classical, Beaux Arts Classical, architecture, urban planning, urban growth, houses, suburbs, suburban architecture, postwar suburbs, Victorian District, Ardsley Park, Chatham Crescent, Parkside, streetcar suburbs, automobile suburbs, Craftsman, Beaux-Arts, City Beautiful Movement, Midcentury Modern, American Foursquare, Craftsman Bungalow, Ranch, Kensington Park, Daffin park, residential

Id: bH9LTKd1fIs

Length: 49min 55sec (2995 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020