Memories of Old West Broad

What brought you to Savannah? If you're visiting, passing through, or relocated to Savannah, what brought you here? If you've grown up in the city, why haven't you left? You may have hundreds of reasons or just one. It could be the arts, the architecture, or that Southern Gothic vibe after sunset. Whatever your reason, there's a history to it. And that history inevitably leads here—West Broad Street. 

Today, you know it as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, one of hundreds of similarly named streets in the country. Today, MLK Jr. Blvd. is the road that connects the bars and restaurants of the Plant Riverside District to the picturesque historic inns of the West Victorian District. If you walk down the road, the historical markers you encounter point towards a powerful past. A legacy of West Broad that many want to dust off and bring back. The ultimate hurdle in restoring Savannah's Historic District. 

But what are we restoring? Ask a Savannahian of a certain age about West Broad, and they'll rattle off the stores they remember shopping in, from Jewish-owned Yachum and Yachums to the Black-owned Savannah Pharmacy and Bynes-Royall Funeral Home. If we end the conversation there, restoring West Broad is about bringing back businesses. But we can't end there, we must understand what West Broad was first. 

West Broad was the epicenter of hundreds, perhaps thousands of groups that sprang up in the adjacent neighborhoods of Yamacraw, Frogtown, Currytown, and Cuyler-Brownsville. The businesses lined the street provided the setting. But the community around them makes West Broad Street more than a memory. 

You could take some great tours if you want to learn this history. Or, you could do a little time traveling. As a former tour guide, I must confess I'm partial to the latter. It's bad business to tell you that time travel is in fact possible. A little patience is all it takes to tap into this magic. 

Sit still for a moment. Breathe in and let the Savannah sun transport you to the time before A/C, breathe out, and witness the coastal breeze tickling the Spanish Moss. There's no need to close your eyes. Just let the past reveal itself. 

Functional Architectural Marvels

The train's shrill wail wakes you. Savannah. 1915. 

Anticipation builds as the train halts at Savannah's glorious gateway: Union Station. You step off the train onto the platform when the striking figure of a Pullman Porter glides past, almost undetected. He makes his way towards the man who's just called him "boy." The indignity is a too common occurrence that the man's tip can't overcome. 

But the porter's attention is fixed on the small crowd waiting on the other side of the man. The porter's reserved facade crumbles at the sight of his wife and all seven children gathered to see their father. The children can barely keep their feet on the ground. He pulls a postcard out of his coat pocket to appease the children as they walk back to their Victorian cottage a few blocks away on Berrien St. 

You press on past the reunion, the iron gate and enter the station proper. Swarms of passengers, porters, and conductors weave through the station. You pass the Sommer's Cafe dining table to get a quick glimpse of the Whites-only waiting room. Its iconic octagonal shape is almost as impressive as the dome above it, bouncing light off the fountain below. 

As you leave the station and look over your shoulder, the towers at the north and south sides of the station stare you down. They hint at Savannah's dual nature. Below, the Station's white stone facade nearly blinds as it hides the Savannah gray bricks underneath. The architecture symbolizes a shameful truth that the station's segregated interior makes plain. There is white Savannah and Black Savannah.

Whatever the unintentional hidden meanings, the station's multiracial crowds were looking for something to do, and somewhere to go, so Union Station never stood alone on West Broad. All it takes is a look up and down the block to know this district is alive.

Where the Paranormal is Normal

Union Station's shadow grows longer, and new electric lights flicker into a steady glow above the passing streetcars. You step a few years into the future and travel just south of the station to capture your arrival in Savannah with a photograph at the studio of Grace De Long. The unassuming two-story building advertises photography on the ground floor and a host of supernatural experiences on the second level. 

Upon hearing you enter, the photographer running the studio puts his coat back on the rack to greet his last customer. His name is Herbert DeLaigle, and he's in his second stint running the studio. Like some other studios on West Broad, his photography makes the radical artistic choice to capture Black families with all the grace, dignity, and sophistication of Savannah's white upper crust. 

After some portraits and pleasantries, you head back to the front door, but turn towards the stairs and the supernatural above. On the second floor is the famed clairvoyant with 1000 eyes, the woman who performed a seance for the president. Madame De Long, as she's known, is in the prime of her sixty-year cross-country career back in the city she couldn't stay away from. 

But De Long doesn't have the monopoly on Savannah's otherworldly scene. The neighborhoods around here are filled with more ghost stories than residents, more paranormal than plumbing. Many Frogtown residents either grew up enslaved on the Sea Islands or are their children. They came to Savannah after the land the US government promised and gave them, then confiscated on behalf of their former enslavers. 

The swamps and mangroves of the Sea Islands provided the perfect shelter for preserving African traditions into the culture we know as Gullah and the Geechee language. Stories abounded in Frogtown of folks flying away in broad daylight, a continuation of the narratives that started in West or Central Africa before reaching its climax at Igbo Landing on St. Simon's Island. 

A detour down the dirt side streets off West Broad brings you into an oral library. Legends of children who came home just a minute after the sun went down, tales of cats with human faces, and conjurers able to revive spouses for a small fortune. Haunting tales told in Geechee, Greek, German, and Yiddish escape from wood stove chimneys and into the humid night air. 

But back to West Broad, where the lights beckon.

An Alternative Entertainment District

Madame De Long's photography and paranormal studio was in the heart of a dazzling entertainment mecca on West Broad. Just next door stands the Dunbar Theater. Four stories tall with a dazzling marquee, it dominates a crowded block. A few steps closer, you can make out the muffled sounds of the Dunbar's house band blaring out the soundtrack to the evening. In the floors above, guests settle into one of the only hotels in downtown Savannah open to Black tourists.  

Like many theaters of the time, their offerings aren't limited to movies. Vaudeville acts once packed these theaters, but they're giving way to popular jazz acts. But the real Jazz Mecca of this era is the Pekin, next door to where St. Philip AME church stands today. The Pekin is as unique as its owner. 

It's unclear if Josephine Stiles was born enslaved on Savannah's Vale Royal plantation or free to formerly enslaved parents. Whatever the circumstances of her birth, by 1909, entrepreneurship was her life. Stiles' Pekin Theater answered Savannah Tribune editor Sol C. Johnson's call for Black entrepreneurs to create alternative entertainment venues. Johnson believed that Black Savannahians should not accept the recently segregated seating in Savannah's downtown theaters.

After a film fire in the early days, Stiles transformed the original storefront theater into the lobby of a grander experience. As you enter, a waft of freshly popped popcorn gives way to the heavy scent of vanilla and tobacco in the lobby's cigar shop. All around you, dreamy onyx columns melt into the white tile floor below. It is a palace, and you are royalty. But tonight, Ma Rainey plays queen, reigning over the audience with a signature performance.

The presence of such famous jazz musicians drew such huge crowds that the city's elders lobbied for and achieved anti-jazz ordinances to protect white morality. But jazz played on, and you can even make out some white Savannahians on a double date ducking into the Pekin for the concert. 

Let's head back up West Broad to the sentinel watching over the district, the Wage Earners Savings Bank.

A Rising Tide

Today, the old building houses the Ralph Gilbert Civil Rights Museum. But the bank, both the business and the building, have long been a hub for community life on West Broad St. As we gaze upon it, we behold the nation's most prosperous Black-owned bank. 

If we step inside during business hours, we find a hive buzzing with mortgages approved, businesses funded, and shops thriving within the building itself. The loans it issued grew business and homeownership beyond its walls, while dentists, barbers, and lawyers set up shop within the bank building. 

Though the bank collapsed almost overnight in 1927—the first rumblings of the impending Depression— West Broad pressed on, breathing new life and companies into the building. As we step back out onto the street, we see the bank's legacy through the Depression and war years in the hundreds of businesses serving as smaller nodes in the fabric of West Broad. 

We pause just outside. As the years flash past, some constants stand out. Institutions like Savannah Pharmacy anchor their block, their families, and the health of the neighborhood. From our vantage point we can see small grocery stores tucked into nearly every residential street. We see neighbors swapping recipes and planning card parties, owners-in-training learning how to make change after school, and perhaps we cover our noses as we look toward the fishmonger up the block.

A look to the south brings the Star Theater into focus, its massive electric star is a beacon for young Black Savannahians looking to escape and see heroes like them on the big screen. While the evening shows bring these young adults within arms' reach of local legends like bolita kingpin "Sloppy Joe" Bellinger, the Saturday matinees are just for the kids.  

If we sit outside the theater on Saturday morning we'll see the likes of young Earl and Richard Shinholster carrying their Coca-Cola bottle caps, ready to trade them in for a screening of the latest Western serials and the chance to bump into that girl from class. 

Behind us, the Guaranty Life Insurance Company takes over the building, with space left over for the Savannah NAACP branch. The postwar boom is in full effect and the Double Victory appears within grasp. Politics, civic pride, human dignity, and church life have always been central to West Broad's character. Now, their convergence will usher in the final chapter in our journey.

Peaks and Valleys

As we look up and down West Broad, we can appreciate the long struggle for equal treatment under the law. The nascent Savannah Civil Rights Movement was mostly clandestine until after the Civil War but once it was out in the open, it was a constant force in the community. 

We can hear knife-wielding politicians like Aaron Bradley, witness West Broad Street packed with pedestrians boycotting segregated streetcars in 1872, suffragette Mary Frances Williams registering voters, and men with copies of the Savannah Tribune tucked under their arm entering the Du Bois'-inspired Savannah Men's Sunday Club.

A quick turn onto Gwinnett and we'd see the Odd Fellows and Freemasons walking out of their respective halls. If we peek into places like the Neptune Restaurant or Star Cafe, we'd see the less formal but equally important clubs like the Night Hawks building that community web.

No matter which weekday organization you attended, just about everyone met at the churches on Sunday. For as many bars and restaurants as there were on West Broad, there were as many churches. 

Standing at one intersection we can see no less than four churches in our immediate vicinity. The distant sound of organs fade out, and the Easter Sunday services flood worshippers onto the streets. In an instant a kaleidoscope of colors bursts forth, a cacophony of chatter swirls with still burning incense. The annual Easter "parade" is now in full swing, as everyone walks home dressed in their finest outfits of the year. It's a scene only possible here.

The churches provided more than sermons and religious service. The churches filled the gaps between a longshoremen's wages and a family's needs, organized voter registration drives, and hosted some of the biggest Civil Rights leaders in the country.

If we step inside Bolton Street Baptist Church, we can hear W.W. Law, taking the mantle from his mentor Ralph Mark Gilbert, leading the next generation of the local NAACP. The Greensboro sit-ins provided a spark, but it was the deeply woven fabric of Black community life on West Broad that blazed down Broughton Street, integrating Savannah in 1963, a year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But as we stand here on West Broad Street in 1963, unease sets in. You watch as the wrecking ball topples Union Station to make way for the I-16 flyover. The Dunbar falls next. A fire takes the Star. In Frogtown and Currytown, families take the wood with them as they sell their homes. The government forces others into new public housing. 

In the blink of an eye we see families pushed from their social, economic, and religious circles. Remaining businesses who watch their customer base forced out of the neighborhood limp on. But the disruption this campaign of "Urban Renewal" unleashes on West Broad appears fatal. 

But in the stillness, when the traffic lights are all red, the chatter of idle engines fades out, and the tour buses pause, you can see the shadows of children playing half-rubber, overhear the whispers of shoppers bragging about their deals, or catch a glimpse of young flames fumbling over their first kiss. You can still feel Old West Broad.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ms. Vaughnette Walker and her staff at the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum for opening their doors and introducing me to the rich history recounted here. Their work keeps this history alive, not as a memory, but as a call to action. 

I would also like to thank Mr. Richard Shinholster for graciously sitting down to recount the aspects of this story that you can only learn by speaking with someone who experienced this firsthand. Mr. Shinholster's Diaspora Marketplace is a fixture of the MLK Blvd streetscape much as he is a fixture in advocating for a better Savannah. If you want to help that vision along, connect with Mr. Shinholster through the I-16 Flyover Removal Project.