As many of you already know, the city of Savannah plans to purchase and demolish 36 historic homes facing West 33rd and 34th streets between Montgomery Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.
The site would be used for a new Central Precinct to replace the shabby and inadequate station on Bull Street.
The modest homes that would be razed date to the 1880s. As Eric Curl recently reported, Peter Wiltberger Meldrim developed the wood frame homes of “Meldrim Row” as housing for black workers, many of whom would have been born into slavery.
Meldrim will also be remembered as a Savannah mayor, a state senator and representative, and a Superior Court judge of the Eastern Judicial Circuit.
Simply put, the homes that the city wants to demolish are some of the oldest and most historic south of Forsyth Park. They represent a rare bit of residential density in a largely blighted neighborhood.
The cottages were rehabbed and reoccupied about 20 years ago after the city made HUD loans totaling about $2.5 million to Century Investors. The loans have since been repaid.
I’ll confess to being stunned by the city’s willingness to destroy so much rich history and to degrade the residential integrity of this struggling corner of the Metropolitan neighborhood.
Details on the site requirements
In a lengthy email exchange with city spokesperson Bret Bell, I was told that a facilities consultant recommended in 2008 that a new Central Precinct needed a building of 17,000 square feet, 75 parking spaces and a minimum of 1.6 acres of land (about 70,000 square feet), assuming stormwater detention could be handled underground.
I asked repeatedly to see something in writing that would explain why so much land would be needed to meet the specifications, but I got nowhere with that request.
No acreage is specified in the consultant’s lengthy report from 2008. In fact, after receiving that report, the city moved ahead with the 2009 purchase of the now infamous 2.5 acre Waters Avenue site with the intention of using it for not one but two precincts.
As I continued to ask questions, Bell steered me toward the folks in the city’s Development Services Department, so I spent a pleasant 90 minutes with architect Cara O’Rourke and engineers Julie McLean and Liberto Chacon.
Chacon, McLean and O’Rourke were not involved in the search process, and they wisely declined to commit to a minimum acreage needed for the precinct. After all, every site is different.
In the preliminary plan for soon-to-be-demolished Meldrim Row, the city would utilize only 1.6 acres of the 1.9 acres available. The plan has over 80 parking spaces, and it’s pretty easy to see where a handful more could be added in the interior of the lot.
More spaces could almost certainly be created if the precinct building, which actually needs a footprint of approximately 20,000 square feet, were moved to one corner of the site.
The preliminary plan does not include the adjacent on-street spaces on Montgomery and MLK.
So the 1.6 acre site could certainly offer 100 parking spaces — 33 percent more than required.
As an example, consider the old Sears building site bounded by Drayton, Duffy, Bull and Henry streets. That site is also 1.6 acres.
As currently configured, the Sears site has a building with a footprint of 28,000 square feet and 106 parking spaces. (The total square footage of the existing building, including the basement, is apparently about 90,000 square feet.)
Now, under current development standards, that Sears lot couldn’t hold so many spaces, but the final result should still be at least 75.
And if more parking spaces were somehow required, there would be the obvious option of dedicating about 30 adjacent spaces on Henry, Bull and Duffy streets for police use only.
So that 1.6 acre site, which meets the minimum land requirement, would obviously be far larger than what is needed.
I don’t have space to go until the math or list the voluminous resources available, but the average acre of land (43,560 square feet) can accommodate over 100 parking spaces.
So let’s say that for some reason we needed as much as 35,000 square feet for 75 spaces.
Add that to the 20,000 square foot building, and we’re looking for a lot size of 55,000 square feet — about 1.3 acres.
Again, that calculation does not include the possible use of on-street spaces, so we might be able to get by with even less.
So I’m suggesting 1.3 acres would possibly be adequate and the city says they need at least 1.6 acres? So what? How could three-tenths of an acre possibly matter?
In this case, three-tenths of an acre might be the difference between a good public policy decision and a catastrophically bad one.
The search process considered two other sites on Montgomery Street just north of Meldrim Row. Both sites are dominated by vacant land and blighted properties, and both were arbitrarily eliminated from consideration because they are 1.3 acres, not 1.6.
And what about other sites?
I’ll close by noting that a few other sites look especially promising but were eliminated from the search process for other reasons.
For example, a two-acre site at Ogeechee Road and 38th Street was eliminated because it’s on a “secondary” arterial road rather than a “primary” one.
Perhaps the most promising location is an undeveloped two-acre parcel at West 52nd and Exchange streets, with easy access to Montgomery Street and MLK. It was eliminated because it’s half a mile south of Victory Drive.
Both those sites are much closer to the geographic center of the precinct than the selected site.
City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 East 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.