Photo Diary: 5 Days in Savannah
This year I proposed spending a few days alone with each of my three sisters, which we’ve never done as adults. I let them pick the setting, and my youngest sister Joanne surprised me by naming Savannah, GA. She couldn’t say what intrigued her about the city. Her impressions weren’t formed the way mine were, by reading John Berendt’s best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Neither of us had ever been there, so we would absolutely be having a shared adventure.
On the flight from LaGuardia, I wore the Harris 2024 t-shirt that my friend Ben Seaman designed, which got plenty of nice smiles and compliments. At the Savannah airport’s taxi stand, the dispatcher and her colleague were very excited to see my shirt and wanted to know where to get one. (You can order it from Ben’s website here.) We had a spirited conversation about how crazy the debate was before she put me in a cab with Remy who drove me downtown to the flipflop shop where I stashed my bag (it was around noon, and I couldn’t get into the Airbnb until close to 4:00) for $5. Right on the corner was a restaurant advertising my favorite words: breakfast all day. I fortified myself with biscuits, gravy, and home fries and set out to explore downtown Savannah on foot.
Right around the corner on Whitaker, one of the main streets that travels west-east (with free bus service all day long), I noticed Savannah Smoke Shop and went in to inquire about the status of cannabis in GA. The young gal there filled me in on the peculiar status — it’s decriminalized, so nobody’s going to get busted for using, but the product they’re allowed to sell is some weird version called THC-A, which is only activated by flame.
I walked up Whitaker to Forsyth Park, which still has a confederate monument. The town is drenched in Southern history. Curiously, the other dominant presence in town is SCAD — Savannah College of Art and Design, which has 60+ buildings all over town, a la NYU. So the downtown area has lots of shops catering to the kids, who are evident in the streets in their goth gear and arty vibes.
Joanne met me at the Airbnb, we did a little grocery shopping, and then we spent some time catching up on family drama and medical issues. For our first night, we decided to have dinner down by the Savannah River (aka “Moon River,” thank you, local hero Johnny Mercer) at the Boar’s Head Tavern. The swordfish special was fantastic. Afterwards it was dark enough to stroll by the river and enjoy the night lights, and we bought our tickets for the hop-on hop-off Old Town Trolley Tour.
That’s how we spent all day Thursday. We ended up on five or six different trolleys and heard many of the same spiels repeatedly. One white driver had a lot to say about movies filmed in Savannah (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, of course, but also Forrest Gump and a bunch of minor films, including one in which — of course — he appeared as background). The best was Miss Pearl, our last driver of the day, by which point it was rainy, everybody was going home, and she was sweet enough to drop us right at our door. She had the next day off so she was planning to turn off her phone, kick back with some Coronas and maybe a shot of Tito’s or two. She asked where we’d had lunch — Café at City Market where we had a delicious low-mayo chicken salad — and when we told her we were having dinner at The Grey, she said, “Oh! Expensive.” I said, “Yeah, we heard Kamala Harris ate there last week.” She said, “You took the words out of my mouth!” It’s fun bonding with black women around love of Kamala.
Given the insane diatribe in the presidential debate about Haitian-American citizens supposedly eating family pets in Springfield, OH, I was intrigued to see a very specific monument downtown by City Market talking about a regiment of Haitian soldiers who played a prominent role in the Revolutionary War.
Who knows if it’s always been this way, but certainly since the Reckoning of 2020 Savannah has definitely upped its game around foregrounding the history of black Americans and the impact of slavery. It’s pretty unavoidable around here. The movie-obsessed trolley driver mentioned that the red doors you see around Savannah (including the one upstairs from where we were staying, Under The Red Door) signified that the mortgage had been paid off. It took Miss Pearl to add the detail that the red door also signified stops on the Underground Railroad.
The greeter at the Café at City Market was Madison, a SCAD student with a spectacular array of face jewelry and tattoos.
Savannah is very charming with its signature feature of 21 squares (urban parks) shaded by live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.
At the end of the trolley line is an eatery called Stoner’s Pizza Joint, so of course we had to take pictures there.
Joanne wanted to check out the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, with its impressive stained glass windows.
When we bought our trolley tickets, the gal upsold us nimbly and encouraged us to buy a ticket from her to the Prohibition Museum. She made it sound like you get a free vintage cocktail there. But of course, it’s ALL about selling the cocktails, which we skipped. Prohibition: what a crazy 13-year chapter in American history. I was amused to see that Anheuser-Busch had created a popular non-alcoholic drink called Bevo.
We dressed for dinner at The Grey, which was smaller than I anticipated (with fewer black patrons). It’s the one place people kept recommending as not-to-be-missed. It is the epitome of a foodie joint, fancy seasonal eccentric menu (categories: Dirt, Water, Pasture, Pantry). Very pricey — $52 for two tiny lamb chops, which Joanne ordered. The food was tasty but not mind-boggling. I had charred okra ($16) and smoked pork shoulder with polenta cake and “chow-chow” (pickle relish). The high-ceilinged space is noisy and about as cozy as an airplane hangar, but I enjoyed the artwork (see Marcus Kenney’s “Collected Stories,” below).
Friday our plan was to do a couple of house tours, starting with the Mercer-Williams House (the murder scene at the heart of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), which was just steps away from us on Monterey Square. When we bought the trolley tickets, the salesgal warned us never to mention “the book” at the house or the proprietor would throw us out. Wrong! Our guide steered right into the story, assuming that most people know about it. The house is small. We only got to tour the first floor, not the ballroom upstairs. Beautifully furnished, of course, and we got to hear about its famous occupant’s expertise as an antiques dealer and his role in renovating something like 70 old mansions in Savannah.
When we got to The Room Where It Happened (Jim Williams shot and killed his out-of-control boyfriend and then underwent four trials until he was acquitted on self-defense, just a few months before he died, after being in prison for a few years), she told the whole story and then moved on. She had plenty to say about the moldings and the furnishings and the Flemish tapestries and the chopped-off portraits and the Tiffany skylight but never once referred to Williams’ vast collection of flagrantly homoerotic sculptures, paintings, and photographs.
I noticed that the monument in the middle of Monterey Square, across from our dwelling, commemorated Casimir Pulaski, the Polish revolutionary war hero name-checked in a Sufjan Stevens song.
When I’m in a new town, for lunch I’m always on the lookout for some version of a lesbian-vegetarian cafe. Fortuitously, the closest eatery of any kind matched that description perfectly: the Sentient Bean, right on Forsyth Park. I had lunch there twice. Great vibe, excellent healthy food.
We decided to tour one other historic mansion, the Isaiah Davenport House, which is credited with launching the city’s preservation story. Built in 1820 as a three-story family residence, it had devolved into a shabby tenement by the early 20th century. On the verge of being torn down for a parking lot in 1955, it was rescued by seven women who formed the Historic Savannah Foundation, which bought the place and turned it into the Davenport Museum.
We got an excellent tour from a knowledgeable guide named Bob. Among other things, the museum provides meticulous documentation of the enslaved workers of the household and urban slavery in general (as opposed to field workers on plantations).
Again, this aspect of the presentation seems to have emerged with particular strength after The Reckoning. Listening to our guide describe the circumscribed lives of the workers these households depended on was heart-wrenching and enraging — how could it not be?
For dinner, we landed at the Pirate’s House, which also came highly recommended from several directions. I worried that it would be a corny tourist trap, but the food turned out to be excellent, plentiful, and classically Southern. Hard to go wrong with honey pecan fried chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, fresh cornbread, crab cakes, and grilled shrimp, eh? Pirate hats and a strolling cosplayer were available but thankfully they left us alone. Tucked inside: the oldest house in Georgia. Upstairs: the inevitable gift shop.
Saturday morning Forsyth Park hosts the city’s big farmer’s market. I was eager to check it out and perhaps acquire some of the summer’s last peaches and corn. No such luck. The market mostly comprised vendors of baked goods and prepared foods, with a few produce stands selling seasonal greens and watermelon. I loved hanging out in the park, though. I’ll never forget the magnificent live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Across the street is the famous Candler Oak, which dates back to the early 1700s.
For our last day together, Joanne and I had artisanal huevos rancheros for brunch at Repeal 33 (next door to The Grey) and then walked a couple of blocks to the SCAD Museum of Art, which had several exhibitions up, none of them especially compelling. A ten-minute documentary called “A Thousand Miles to Freedom” depicted an enslaved couple who escaped to the north and then to England. The art included some young artists I’d never heard of, a few wan Dan Flavin neon sculptures, and a show of Isabel Toledo dresses in the André Leon Talley Gallery. Outdoors they’d created a kind of hilarious hangout space, SCAD Beach.
In the afternoon we concluded our great adventure and Joanne flew home to Aurora, Colorado, where most of my family has lived for decades. The demographics of the state’s third largest city have shifted over the years, and as with any town that’s gone through an economic decline, the city has its challenges. But I’m very familiar with it as a pleasant suburb, not the gang-ridden hellscape that the Republican candidate for president has tried to label it, as the New York Times reported just today.
After Joanne left, I had a couple of days to enjoy Savannah on my own. For dinner I scoped out a neighborhoody wine bar far from downtown called Sobremesa. The restaurant was superb, cozy, quiet, and beautifully lit. I had a couple of glasses of mencia and two scrumptious small-ish plates: a salad with fennel, peach, cashew, and feta and just about the best gnocchi I’ve ever eaten. crunchy with sweet potato, corn, chicken, pesto, and parmesan. I read Sacha Weiss’s New York Times Magazine piece on the nine-hour Prince documentary while I ate.
I spent a leisurely Sunday morning preparing for a Zoom call, booked a massage for later in the day (Dr. Scott Miller, excellent), and then took myself out to lunch at the Sentient Bean again, where I had a fantastic farmer’s market brunch bowl while reading last week’s Sunday Times Book Review. Garth Greenwell is getting a lot of attention with his new novel, Small Rain. (He recently posted on his Substack his minutely detailed response to getting reviewed by the New York Times and the New Yorker on the same day.) He fascinates me as a writer. I read and admired his novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness. His gaze is so microscopic in a way I find dazzling. I wish I had the patience and self-training to focus that penetratingly. He was the subject of the Book Review’s “By the Book” column and had this intriguing comment about writing:
You’ve described yourself as a fan of “annoyingly obsessive granular” close reading. Where do you think that came from?
Painters used to learn by copying the great masters, composers by writing out the scores of Bach. Neurotic close reading is a way for writers to do something similar: an attempt not just mechanically to transcribe, but to enter into a process of making the choices, conscious and unconscious, that went into a great work. That’s where aesthetic education happens. It’s also a training in attentiveness, the artist’s most important resource.
After lunch I walked back through Forsyth Park, lively on the weekend. I stumbled upon a company of cosplayers who make themselves available for Itty Bitty Princess Parties. I chatted up a vivacious young gal in mermaid costume who calls herself Ariel.
For my last dinner in Savannah, I couldn’t resist the temptation to check out the Nepalese restaurant in town and had an excellent curry bowl delivered to my Airbnb. I wolfed it down watching Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda comedy special on Netflix.
The weather wasn’t great, gray and drizzly much of the time I was in Savannah, though the temperature was balmy with an occasional warm breeze. My last morning the sun peeked out a little bit, and I strolled along what’s called the prettiest street in town, Jones Street. I’d seen just a few Trump signs hanging from houses, and finally along Jones Street I spied a couple of Harris Walz banners. I look forward to Georgia doing its part to save the country (again) in November.
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