When I asked Clinton Edminster how he expected the Starland area to change over the next few years, he paused for a moment and looked out the big windows of Starlandia Creative Supply.
With precision, he replied, “I see a lot of things that have been happening inside buildings, happening outside.”
Gesturing to the businesses on both the east and west sides of Bull Street, he added, “There is a playfulness that has to happen between the two sides of the street.”
“Why aren’t there crosswalks?” he wondered aloud.
That’s a question I’ve asked in this column, many times.
Starlandia Creative Supply (http://starlandiasupply.com) opened last week in a surprisingly large commercial space at 2438 Bull St, at the corner of 41st Street. The store carries new and used art supplies, plus a smattering of other eclectic items.
When I dropped by last week, Edminster and his employees were in the midst of an initial push to acquire used art supplies from Savannah College of Art and Design students before the spring quarter ended.
If you’ve got art supplies that you aren’t using, you can swap them at Starlandia for store credit equivalent to 30 percent of the store’s retail price for them. In the short time I was there, two art students brought bags of materials. One received well over $100 in store credit.
Edminster told me that a few people were so eager to unload materials that they simply gave them away. The Starlandia “street team” is now scouring lanes for discarded art supplies — a spring tradition for some local artists and pack rats.
Once Starlandia is fully stocked, Edminster estimates that about 70 percent of the store’s items will be used and about 30 percent new.
It’s hard to miss the brightly painted Starlandia, which seems like a nice fit with its closest retail neighbors — the vintage shop The Vicar’s Wife and the boutique NOLAjane.
A hardworking optimist who spent many summers working on his family’s salmon fishing boat out of Homer, Alaska, Edminster is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Art Rise Savannah, which sponsors the First Friday Art March and other initiatives.
For the summer months, Edminster said, Starlandia will focus on cultivating connections to local residents, including through a variety of workshops. When fall arrives, there will be another big push to draw SCAD students.
Starlandia is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Starland’s evolution
There has already been considerable press coverage of Starlandia Creative Supply, and the evolution of Starland is a regular topic of conversation these days, at least for neighborhood residents, real estate professionals and other stakeholders.
Many of the discussions seem to assume the plans for an arts district anchored by the old Starland Dairy are relatively new, but the original vision — developed by John Deaderick and Greg Jacobs — dates to the 20th century. Things were moving ahead pretty quickly when this paper published the 2001 article “Starland Dairy project moo-ves toward approval.”
In those early years, Gallery 28 at the corner of Drayton and 41st streets was hosting cutting-edge exhibitions. The old nightclub at 2424 Bull St., which holds the Old Savannah City Mission Bargain Center, was being used as a DIY music venue, theatre space and art gallery.
The loss of the collective memory of Starland’s recent history has two roots.
First, much of the current energy in Starland is coming from young adults who are relatively new to the city or who were still in grade school when the vision developed. And a deep recession intervened, which essentially stalled private investment in marginal neighborhoods for five years.
So isn’t it possible that the current interest in Starland will stall, as it has stalled before?
No. The differences between then and now are extreme.
We now have new businesses committed to the area with solid leases.
The increasing rents in other commercial corridors in greater downtown Savannah make the centrally located Starland even more attractive.
The One West Victory development brought many more SCAD students to the neighborhood and is home to Hugh Acheson’s restaurant The Florence.
After a short interruption, renovations have restarted on the former Bull Street branch of Bank of America, which will also be a restaurant.
There’s also no ignoring that issues surrounding race are impacting the economy of the Bull Street corridor between Victory Drive and Forsyth Park.
Right now, the Starland area has some thriving black-owned businesses that cater to primarily black clienteles. Those businesses seem capable of thriving indefinitely, but they face a potential stumbling block as the residential demographics continue shifting dramatically.
Starland’s census tract lost hundreds of black residents between the 1990 and 2000 Censuses, and hundreds more between 2000 and 2010. As of 2010, the Census tract that includes Starland had more white residents than black residents.
The census tract immediately north — bounded more or less by Park Avenue, Price Street, 34th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard —had a slight black majority in 2010, but that has almost certainly flipped to a white majority by now.
The city of Savannah itself was responsible for the loss of more than 5 percent of the neighborhood’s black population with the demolition of dozens of homes in Meldrim Row.
Such dramatic changes clearly pose challenges for neighborhood businesses, no matter who owns them.
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.
By Bill Dawers