The new Embassy Suites Savannah is open at 605 W. Oglethorpe Ave.
The exterior of the massive building is mostly brick and looks a bit better in the urban landscape than some of downtown’s other newish hotels.
The 150-room hotel is across Oglethorpe Avenue from Chatham Area Transit’s new Joe Murray Rivers Jr. Intermodal Transit Center, just west of the Hampton Inn & Suites and just north of the SCAD Museum of Art on Turner Boulevard.
It’s even bigger than it appears at first. The hotel’s parking garage occupies the once vacant lot behind The Thunderbird Inn.
The monument to Bishop Henry McNeal Turner on Turner Boulevard sure doesn’t look as lonely and isolated as it once did.
Some pretty good choices were made in the hotel’s final design.
A plethora of newly planted palms softens the overall effect of the new structures. The parking garage has commercial bays on the ground level facing Turner Boulevard and Fahm Street.
The main building has frequent entrances to ground level public spaces, which makes the building a little friendlier to pedestrians than it appears at first.
The gas lanterns are a nice touch too.
I’ve written pretty often about the expanding boundaries of what most Savannahians consider to be “downtown.”
Even after years of major developments, many still seem to think that everywhere east of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is poverty ridden and dangerous.
Such assertions were heard routinely during the public debate about the city’s decision to build a new arena off Stiles Avenue.
Many don’t seem to have noticed that SCAD, which has an obvious stake in security and in pedestrian friendliness, located the bulk of its housing near Boundary Street years ago.
And hoteliers and institutions have steadily been investing in other properties nearby.
If the city is able to realize the vision for a “canal district” that would include paths and new connections between Westside neighborhoods, guests at the Embassy Suites would have an easy half-mile walk to the planned arena.
I know some of my readers scoff at the idea of pedestrians embracing such new paths, but SCAD students and tourists already make thousands of trips on foot per day in the area between Boundary Street and MLK.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the short run, Embassy Suites Savannah is a significant new entry in downtown’s inventory of hotels.
And if we’re going to get additional hotels of such scale, then it makes a lot of sense to have ones like this that are outside the confines of General Oglethorpe’s original grid.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.