4 minute read
Old Savannah: City Market
OLD SAVANNAH
Restoring History
Today’s City Market belies a complex past
Written by JESSICA LYNN CURTIS
WHEN YOU ENVISION CITY MARKET, chances are the lively and colorful stretch along West Saint Julian Street springs to mind: a place where you might spend a sunny afternoon gallery hopping, perusing the works of artists like Sabree and Alix Baptiste, or sampling your way from Byrd Cookie Company to Vinnie Van Go-Go’s to Pie Society. You can pop into the American Prohibition Museum to learn why Billy Sunday declared Savannah “the wickedest city in the world” and enjoy a cocktail at its Congress Street Up speakeasy or listen to a local singer-songwriter perform while strolling the streets and sidewalks designed by Gunn, Meyerhoff, Shay Architects.
But today’s City Market, a pedestrian mall created in the 1980s along with the restoration of Franklin Square, was actually named as a tribute to Savannah’s old City Market, the fourth in a series of market houses that existed on the adjacent Ellis Square.
Ellis Square, one of the first four squares in accordance with Gen. James Oglethorpe’s plan of Savannah, was laid out in 1733 as part of Decker Ward and became the city’s first area of commerce, according to Dr. Stan Deaton of the Georgia Historical Society. Its first market building, where food and other goods were sold, appears on a map dated 1757. It was also known as Market Square, and, like Savannah itself, this picturesque area has been filled with equal parts vivacity and tragedy, beginning with the four market houses, which all met unfortunate ends.
A fire destroyed Savannah’s first market building in 1788. Its second suffered the same fate when it was lost to the Great Fire of 1820. The third market house, erected in 1821, was used during the Civil War as a place to tend to fallen soldiers. When the war ended, the building was demolished.
The fourth and largest market house was designed by Augustus Schwaab and Martin Muller and took two years to build. Dr. Robin Williams, chair of the architectural history department at Savannah College of Art and Design, explains that the two architects, both German immigrants, utilized their native Rundbogenstil style, a simplified variant on Romanesque architecture, to create the building’s 33,000-square-foot space, featuring a cellar below and a belfry above.
“When completed in 1872, the tower floor held at least 150 booths,” says Vaughnette Goode-Walker, historian and owner/operator of Footprints of Savannah Walking Tours. “The market thrived with an abundance of meats,
During the late 1800s, the expansive market building had electric railway tracks to accommodate streetcar traffi c.
vegetables, exotic fruit, seafood, hogshead, live chickens, baked goods and sweets.”
In 1882, it got electricity, and by 1892 electric railway tracks accommodated streetcar traffi c through the market building. But the bustle didn’t last: in 1954, thriving no more, the market was leased by the City of Savannah to Savannah Merchants Cooperative Parking Association, a company who demolished it to build a parking garage. This controversial act helped to spur the historic preservation movement in Savannah, Goode-Walker says.
“The squares have become so revered in Savannah that for modern Savannahians, it’s almost shocking to fi nd out that they were treated that callously by the city administration just some 60 years ago,” says Deaton, noting two other squares — Liberty Square and Elbert Square — were lost entirely. “They were just paved over.”
When the parking association’s lease expired in 2004, Savannah wasted no time in reclaiming one of its original squares. “Public feedback called for a modern square, which was installed on top of a large underground parking garage,” Williams says. The present Ellis Square, at City Market’s east end, is a happy marriage of a traditional square and a modern one, with splash fountains, a sunken grassy area for kids to play and public bathroom facilities. Williams says its openness makes it feel much more akin to the hardscaped public spaces of New York and large European cities. “And like them,” he says, “it’s always teeming with life.”
For all the stunning revitalization of the City Market and Ellis Square area, many locals are advocating for something they feel is still missing — acknowledgement of the full history of the area, including the fact it housed the operations of antebellum-era slave traders.
On the top fl oor of a building once known as the Montmollin Building (now part of today’s City Market), slave traders John Montmollin and Alexander Bryan ran Bryan’s Slave Mart, beginning in the mid-1850s.
“That was ground zero for people being bought and sold here for many years,” confi rms Deaton, “until the United States Army arrived in December 1864 and put an end to slavery for all time here.”
Once the building was seized, the government approved it for use by the Savannah Educational Association. There, they opened their fi rst freedmen’s school, the Bryan Free School, in early 1865.
Years prior, in the basement of this same building, an enslaved man, Ulysses L. Houston, worked as a butcher. Houston “hired his time” in the days before his freedom by paying his master a portion of his earnings. (Historian Whittington B. Johnson wrote in Black Savannah 1788–1864 that “hiring out” created a loophole for some enslaved peoples, allowing them to “live quasi-free lives.”) Houston was also pastor of First Bryan Baptist Church, where he called for slavery’s end. As such, he was one of 20 black preachers to meet with General William Tecumseh Sherman to discuss what freedpeople would need to fully realize freedom. He was a beloved community leader and was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1868.
