Herbert Kemp remembers as a child running alongside the streetcar that ran through his Sandfly neighborhood and throwing acorns through its open windows.
Born in 1931, Kemp has spent his entire life in this historic African-American community, settled by the descendants of slaves who worked on nearby Wormsloe Plantation.
Kemp’s grandmother, a midwife, helped deliver him in the house next door to where he lives on Central Avenue, and she would later help deliver Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, born in 1948 in Pin Point.
These sorts of connections and stories are abundant in Sandfly, which in recent years has struggled to cope with commercial encroachment.
A number of African-Americans amassed large tracts of land in southeast Chatham County after Reconstruction and fought to maintain ownership through the Great Depression and Jim Crow era. The streetcar line that stretched down Central was the primary artery between Savannah and Isle of Hope, where Savannahians would go to relax by the water.
These were craftsmen, tradesmen and educators who built their own homes and created a vibrant community centered around their families and their churches.
“Sandfly, to many of us, is our 40 acres and a mule because our properties have been handed down from generation to generation,” said Kemp.
As those generations have gone by, some tracts have been divided among dozens of descendants — cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings — some of whom live in other states or can no longer afford the expense of maintaining their properties.
Kemp and his siblings have made a pact not to sell their land that stretches along the entire left side of Central to the Herb River, but he knows not all families can or will do the same.
For this reason, Kemp, as outgoing president of the Sandfly Community Betterment Association, is rekindling efforts to collect signatures to get a local historic designation ordinance for Sandfly.
At a meeting on Nov. 1 at Kemp’s house, five other volunteers gathered around to tally the signatures Kemp had collected in a manila folder and discuss their strategy for moving forward.
Local historic designation in unincorporated Chatham County requires more than 50 percent of property owners within the proposed district. For the district the Sandfly association is proposing, made up of 278 mostly residential parcels, they need 139 signatures to reach that threshold.
With that, Sandfly could create design standards and other stipulations that, while not completely halting commercial intrusion, would regulate it.
Tom Thomson, executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, said they have been assisting the community with this effort for years.
“The planning commission stands ready to help them move that forward. We’ve been giving them advice to get them to stage one,” he said.
Ellen Harris, director of urban planning and historic preservation for the MPC, has been Sandfly’s point person since 2008 and said they are close to the required signatures. As of Friday, Kemp said they still need 15 more.
After that’s completed, they can draft the design standards and an ordinance to take to the Chatham County Historic Preservation Commission and afterward the County Commission.
“What we try to emphasize to the community is that this is a bottom up, not a top-down approach ... the onus to start the process is primarily on them,” she said.
Wal-Mart
Sandfly’s first big fight came around 2001 when Target announced plans to build a superstore off Montgomery Crossroad — though they ultimately pulled the plug after public outcry.
Then Wal-Mart quickly bought the property and gained unanimous approval from the Metropolitan Planning Commission’s appointed board to build its namesake supercenter and a Sam’s Club.
County Commissioner Helen Stone was on the MPC’s board at the time in 2002 and said she remembers the hours-long meeting that led up to the vote.
“It started out as a Target, and the residents did not want the rezoning. They wanted their neighborhood to stay intact,” she said, citing this as one reason she later decided to run for office.
Two local churches took Wal-Mart to court in 2004, but the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed their suit because the store already had been built.
Since then, mistrust has only grown between the residents of Sandfly, the county and the Metropolitan Planning board.
Kemp said it started with the widening of Montgomery Crossroad in the ‘90s — which displaced 35 graves from the Eugenia cemetery — and continued as the proposed path of the Truman Parkway was moved several times.
“There was not supposed to be an off-ramp at Montgomery Crossroad,” said Kemp. “They changed it to suit the properties in which the developers wanted to develop.”
He said promises made in the wake of Wal-Mart, including a community center and public library, were also never realized.
Over the summer, some residents wrote to the Savannah Morning News dismayed that the visual buffer of trees and shrubs in front of Wal-Mart was being clear cut to make way for a new McDonald’s. MPC director Thompson clarified that the visual buffer only applied to the other three sides and not the front outparcels, but residents are still unhappy about it.
Sabrina Kent, president of the Nottingham Woods Association, who’s also volunteering to help collect signatures for Sandfly, said she’s seen this happen too often, in which developers will say one thing to appease the community — adding a significant buffer, for example — then breaking their word later.
“They’ll say one thing and if you don’t pay attention, they’ll start changing the plans and figure we’re not paying attention,” she said.
Kemp said they receive crime reports every month of several shoplifting arrests and other petty crimes because of their big box neighbors.
Rezoning
The Sandfly association called the Nov. 1 emergency meeting after a close call at the Metropolitan Planning Commission on Oct. 28, where local pharmacist Jason Conley, represented by attorney Phillip McCorkle, requested rezoning of 2.1 acres he’d purchased on Skidaway Road, across from the Norwood Market plaza, to build a 10,000-square-foot pharmacy and offices.
After a contentious debate, board members voted down his zoning request 6-4, but not before approving changes on the future land use map for the area.
The split ruling signaled that although the MPC felt uncomfortable rezoning the parcel in question, they believed it was inevitable the corridor would become more commercialized.
Kent, who spoke during public comment, said she believed this was a case of entitlement shopping.
“The precursor to all that is to get it rezoned for a ‘mom-and-pop pharmacy’ and have Walgreen’s move in,” she said, after some board members intimated as much during questioning.
Norman Luten Jr., whose house is adjacent to the proposed pharmacy, also spoke against the rezoning, citing the heavy noise and traffic already afflicting Skidaway.
Luten’s great grandfather, Ben Luten, was a conductor for the Savannah Electric Co. and amassed the property known as Luten Hill that is now divided among several descendants, some of whom no longer live in Georgia.
Norman’s cousin, Isaac Luten III, sold one tract to Conley in 2013 but not the more valuable corner lot on Elmhurst and Skidaway because that was his father’s home. He said there was nothing personal about the sale, but that over the years many of their relatives had lost touch, moved away and the onus of upkeep for some of the property had mostly fallen on him and his sister.
He now lives in nearby Lakeview and said he would prefer to see more multi-family development to keep the residential character of Sandfly, though he agreed to stay neutral after selling the land.
Commissioner Stone, who represents the Sandfly district, said she opposed the pharmacy because of heavy traffic and because CVS and Wal-Mart already served the area.
“Commercially that area is growing, and it doesn’t mean they can’t co-exist, but I don’t think we need to start going out there and spot zoning,” she said.
Kemp said it is this “inevitability” argument that he is fighting hardest and is blunt when speaking about McCorkle, who also represented the developers of Wal-Mart. During the MPC meeting, McCorkle argued it was longer viable to build single-family homes along Skidaway and that the area would likely continue to develop commercially, pointing to the Town Center overlay that had been adopted in 2003 to make way for mixed-use development.
“Phillip McCorkle has made a point to devastate Sandfly,” said Kemp. “He is trying to paint a picture that is dire, but our land is inherited and that’s why there isn’t more development.”
McCorkle did not return calls for comment.
Historic status
Obtaining local status doesn’t affect zoning, so it won’t stop these sorts of petitions, but it may help mitigate some of the more negative consequences of commercial development.
For example, Sandfly could agree to put covenants on their land, which would restrict the types of buyers in the event the land is sold. Design standards could also be drafted through the ordinance, which future developers would have to follow.
Sandfly had previously made its own roadmap with the help of the Georgia Conservancy and students from Armstrong State University and Savannah College of Art and Design, addressing the community’s concerns while looking at its vision for the future, adding things like street lamps and sidewalks.
In order to receive tax credits for rehabilitation, however, the community would also need to apply for designation from the National Register of Historical Places.
Patty Deveau, a Coastal Georgia historian, helped the association with their national register nomination several years ago, collecting oral histories and matching them to primary documents that are now catalogued at the David Russell library at the University of Georgia.
“By the time I came in, that community was being threatened by development, by the Truman Parkway, by road widening, because it was not viewed outside the community as being viable,” she said.
The National Register effort stalled after Deveau completed her work — though she believes all the necessary documentation is still in place.
Kemp said he is focused on the local designation first but ideally would like to have both in order for the community to have access to the tax incentives to fix up their homes. Volunteers at the Sandfly meeting last week said they would use this as part of their pitch when educating their neighbors on why they should sign the petition for historic status.
Deveau said she believed it’s been tougher for Sandfly to complete this task because it’s not stuck in time but is a living, working community.
“It’s difficult to figure out the best way to protect those types of communities,” she said, but highlighted Pin Point as an example of a place that had done well with preserving their heritage.
A matter of time
So why has it taken so long to get this designation? A variety of factors.
Kemp has suffered from ill health in the last few years, including two brain tumors, and said the effort seemed to “fall apart” without his direction.
“It was very difficult to get somebody to step up and take over,” he said.
After Conley began seeking rezoning of the Luten property, Norman Luten agreed to take over and spearhead collecting the rest of the signatures.
But that wasn’t the only problem. Some property owners are worried about an increase in property taxes, while other properties are rentals or held under LLC status, making their owners more difficult to track down.
Because the area they want to designate has some parts that are in the city and some in the county, Harris said, they will have to contend with two government bodies instead of one.
Ultimately, time is the biggest hurdle.
“My doctor told me if I don’t have to worry about it, leave it alone,” Kemp said.
At the neighborhood meeting, Kent signaled to the others the need for urgency.
“We need to move very quickly to getting this done so we don’t have to go through this again,” she said. “If you don’t move on this now, I promise you within three to four months, they’re coming back.”
Although no longer the mischievous kid pitching acorns at trolley cars, the still fiery Kemp, who uses a cane, has an even firmer deadline.
“I would like to see it done before I’m in a wheelchair,” he said.
For more information on Sandfly’s efforts to get a historic status, contact Norman Luten, president of the Sandfly Community Betterment Association, at 912-354-0128.