We still don’t know what the current owners of Savannah River Landing have planned for the site.
As reporter Julia Ritchey noted in a piece in this newspaper on Sunday, MMA Capital has been tight-lipped about their vision for the property along the Savannah River immediately east of River Street.
Lots of folks around town have their own ideas for the site, that’s for sure.
In a month or so, we should get the results of a city-funded study of the feasibility of a new multi-use stadium that would be home to the Savannah Sand Gnats. That study is likely to focus considerable attention on the 54-acre Savannah River Landing.
Considering the amount of money that the current owners already have in the site, would the city even be able to afford the necessary land at SRL?
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the master plan for Savannah River Landing attracted international attention before the recession hit.
General Oglethorpe platted the site, but it proved unsuitable for development until massive amounts of dirt were added early in this century.
Architect and urban designer Christian Sottile came on board to adapt the Oglethorpe plan so the new space would have squares and a scale similar to the Landmark Historic District.
“With a conventional master plan, which often foresees all of the buildings from Day 1,” said Sottile in a glowing 2007 piece in The New York Times, “you freeze in time the mix of uses. This is the opposite. It’s town-building. The streets come first, public spaces come first and the blocks become spaces for building, which are not prescribed. It’s highly unusual for American cities.”
I doubt we’ll see the same mix of commercial and residential space that was envisioned by the original developer Ambling Cos., and we certainly won’t see the whole site developed as rapidly as some imagined during the boom years.
Hoteliers will surely be interested in Savannah River Landing, especially if we continue to see so much demand from tourists. But will the current site owners see adequate demand for new office space? For retail? For residential development?
However this plays out, the city has a stake in making sure the development has a mix of uses and in maintaining Oglethorpe’s vision of squares and interconnected streets. As we’ve noted before, the Oglethorpe Plan has proved amazingly adaptable to the modern era.
Savannah’s urban fabric is one of the main reasons people want to visit and move here. We need to be certain that future developers of the site understand that.
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.