Before the St. Patrick’s Day mania began, a friend and I made our first trip to the lovely new beer garden at Moon River Brewing Company.
The ambitious project has redefined the highly visible southeast corner of Bay and Whitaker streets. Just a few months ago, that might have been the ugliest corner in the Historic District.
I’ll confess that I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of the space or for the extent of the construction.
In a new building along Bay Lane, there’s a long bar with comfortable tables close by. The bar connects to Moon River’s existing dining room, but the new annex has a separate kitchen and bathrooms.
Transparent garage doors can be raised or lowered so the bar can be used year round.
A large pergola, which should offer some nice shade as the weather heats up, covers much of the outdoor area. The materials, angles and varied furniture successfully break up the large space.
We sat in the corner closest to the intersection of Bay and Whitaker. There was obviously a fair bit of traffic noise, but it wasn’t as loud or distracting as either of us expected. From that vantage, it’s easy to appreciate the sheer mass of Moon River’s historic home, built in 1821 as the City Hotel.
The landscaping looks pretty good now, but could be spectacular as the plants and trees mature.
For many years, I’ve heard friends and readers complain about the lack of outdoor spots for dining or drinking, but entrepreneurs have been responding to that need in recent years.
Moon River’s new beer garden is the latest in a string of positive developments.
Way back in 2008, the Congress Street Social Club began making optimal use of its large patio.
The new B&D Burgers on Congress Street replaced an unsightly surface parking lot with a lovely patio. As I’ve noted in this column many times, surface parking lots represent particularly poor uses of space in urban settings.
The Rail Pub has also gotten in on the act with the recent opening of a patio on the surface lot next door.
Further south, The Public Kitchen & Bar opened last year with outdoor dining at the lush corner of Bull and Liberty streets.
Open spaces like these can present some problems, especially noise if there are residential uses nearby. But outdoor spaces enhance street life and urban vibrancy.
During last weekend’s Savannah Stopover, the patios at both B&D Burgers and the Congress Street Social Club hosted excellent early gigs. And it wasn’t just the Stopover ticket holders who enjoyed the music — some tourists and other random passersby lingered for long stretches on the sidewalk.
Now we need to make sure we don’t mess things up with impractical, unenforceable noise ordinances, inflated property taxes or other counterproductive public policies.
Local unemployment rate falling, even as more workers join labor force
Tuesday’s City Talk looked closely at some of the Georgia Department of Labor’s recent estimates of local employment. Those numbers paint a promising picture.
Additional data for January was released a few days ago. The latest release includes estimates from the ongoing survey of households used to determine the unemployment rate.
According to the numbers, the Savannah metro area unemployment rate declined from 8.9 percent in January 2012 to 8.3 percent in January 2013. That’s a fairly fast rate of improvement, although the job market might not be totally healed for several more years.
Cynics will argue the unemployment rate is declining because people are giving up looking for work and dropping out of the labor force. We definitely saw statistical evidence of that trend during the worst of the downturn, but the opposite is happening now.
In fact, the number of workers in the local civilian labor force increased by more than 2 percent over the past year, considerably faster than population growth.
The city of Savannah still has a higher unemployment rate than the larger metro area of Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties. But Savannah’s rate is falling faster. The unemployment rate for the city of Savannah was 9.8 percent in January, down from 10.7 percent a year earlier.
By the way, none of these numbers have been adjusted for seasonality. January is always a lousy month for employment, so the rate will be considerably lower in the next few releases.
And keep in mind that employment is a lagging indicator of economic activity. The bustle of the last few months bodes well for the jobs data this spring and summer. So maybe we can begin recalibrating our thinking a little. During the worst of the recession, many of us were happy to see any job growth at all, no matter the nature of those jobs.
Now we can have more strategic discussions about the balance of jobs that we need for Savannah to fare better in the next recession and to prosper in the 21st century.
City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 East 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.