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I'm not sure that if driven by commerce and the drive to bigness either Charleston or Savannah would still have a magnificent historical core. I can see them obliterated by a dense population of highrises.
Uh, you can have a magnificent historic core with highrises. Boston and Philly manage to do this just fine.
Uhhh....My answer was not that they could have. But would they have. Utter speculation.
Had they continued to grow throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, sure they would have. But had they experienced a post-war boom like Atlanta and Charlotte, there's a good chance they might not.
I think part of the charm with Charleston and Savannah is because of the size. They aren't too big or too small. But they certainly don't have the vast array of cultures like Boston and Philly.
If that is the limitation of the comparison, ok. But the two are so different- much more so than CHarleston and Boston IMO. Philly is a very very gritty place. Savannah is kind of the opposite.
My thoughts are more in line with Galounger’s thinking. Oglethorpe had big plans for Savannah to be something more than what it was today. Savannah’s grid layout was meant to be repeated as the city grew so there’s no reason to not think that the historic district would not have gone on for miles had the city seen steady growth back then through several time periods (as Galounger brought out). Had Savannah saw a great influx of people early on….we’d certainly have a major metro sitting on GA’s coast (maybe….I was told that malaria messed up a lot). Anyway, Oglethorpe’s plan should have been re-implemented in ATL or something instead of going to waste. Anyway, a lot of people would say think Philly of the South had Oglethorpe’s plan spanned many miles.
For what it's worth, Savannah's strict grid system MINUS the squares was continued through the Victorian Era to the southern city limit at present-day Victory Drive. At the dawn of the 20th century (early 1900s) the grid was again continued south, east and west with a modified version of the squares. These can be easily seen along the length of Abercorn Street south of Victory Drive.
The Ardsley Park and Chatham Crescent neighborhoods (now considered the most affluent and desirable of Savannah's historic inner city residential districts) are designed with pocket parks, elilpses, wide boulevard main streets (with landscapes medians) separating smaller, narrower residential avenues -- institutional (churches, schools) uses scattered throughout. The Atlantic Avenue mall entrance to the 1920s Savannah High School building (now Savannah Arts Academy) fronting Washington Avenue is simply breathtaking.
Savannah's strict street-grid development continued South through the 1940s and 50s, when the southern city limits ended at present-day DeRenne Avenue. As suburban development (mostly driven by white flight) conotnued further south beyond DeRenne into the 1960s, the grid was eventually broken -- leading to the more modern "sprawl-like" development seen in other southern cities. Even so, the entire city of Savannah far beyond the original downtown Historic District core is far more orderly than other Southern cities, including Charleston, because of that tradition started by Oglethorpe in 1733.
Parts of Savannah are indeed very gritty. But the Historic District core is one of the most pristine and perfectly preserved urban districts in the world. And beyond the "gritty" sections that frame the downtown core, the rest of Savannah proper (and much of the suburbs) are just like any coastal sunbelt city, with some amazing beautiful areas along with the usual endless sprawl of shopping malls and fast-food joints.
It's unfortunate that many people visit Savannah and think downtown is all there is. There's a LOT more to Chatham County (population 300,000) than what tourists see within those 2.5 square miles.
I was talking more about the downtown. Philly is 100% gritty at its center. Savannah at its center is not.
Do you mean the culture at the "center"/"core"/"heart" of Philly is gritty? Or that Center City is gritty? The former I can see, though it's changing. The latter is completely false.
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