I thought I would get some irritated emails about some of the statements in my City Talk column last Sunday, Savannah’s Project DeRenne — ambitious, effective, expensive:
The traffic on DeRenne makes it a physical barrier between older portions of the city to the north and newer ones to the south.
But for those of us who spend most of our time in the downtown area, the barren ugliness of DeRenne serves as a psychological barrier as well.
When I first started writing this column back in 2000, I heard routinely from folks who lived on the Southside but rarely ventured downtown.
Now I’m much more likely to hear the opposite. There seems to be a growing number of downtown area residents who just don’t want to cross DeRenne.
But I didn’t hear anything negative about that column. Maybe everyone agrees. Maybe people have quit reading. Maybe readers are just sick of talking about DeRenne, still. Maybe cynicism about the possibility of any improvement has taken hold.
In public discourse about DeRenne, we’ve generally conceptualized the issues in terms of east and west.
Consider this: “How can we make it faster for people in West Chatham and Effingham to get to their jobs at the hospitals and nearby businesses?”
But if that’s the only question we’re trying to answer, let’s save our money. Spending money simply to speed rush hour traffic through the DeRenne corridor will simply fuel sprawl.
Fortunately, the Citizen Office with the city, the Metropolitan Planning Commission, and a host of citizens are thinking much more broadly than that. You can read about the plans on this page. Here’s a small version of a huge image of the current DeRenne concept that’s among those you can see via that site:
Traffic matters, for sure, but to my mind the real problem with DeRenne right now is the way that it divides the city between north and south. As I noted in that passage above, we’ve been experiencing a sea change in people’s concepts of the city and its layout.
When I moved here in 1995, it was common to hear paranoid talk about Savannah’s artificial boundaries: a schoolgirl telling me that her parents told her she could never visit friends who lived on “numbered streets”; a friend telling me that Price Street is “the DMZ”; and, over and over, early readers of my columns telling me that they never go downtown because of crime. Back then, even some downtown people were really serious about not going south of Gaston Street.
But now the balance has shifted dramatically. We’ve still got some dramatic problems in my general neighborhood between Victory Drive and Forsyth Park, but it’s now considered by many to be one of Savannah’s most interesting places to live with the most potential for young entrepreneurs.
One of these days, I need to write a fuller account of the recent history of the Thomas Square and Metropolitan neighborhoods. Suffice here to say that I’m talking to young people all the time in this neighborhood and in the Victorian neighborhoods who are relying more and more heavily on their feet and their bicycles. They’re shopping in the immediate neighborhood — or going no farther than some chains like Target and Home Depot on Victory Drive. Maybe they venture as far south as Habersham Village. They are going nowhere near the Southside.
That’s largely because of the barrier — physical and psychological — of DeRenne Avenue. It’s an artificial barrier, but a real one.
And it works to everyone’s detriment when citizens mentally wall off a whole portion of the city from their possible explorations.
Such sequestration doesn’t serve us well, whether it’s a Southside resident refusing to come downtown or a downtown area resident looking with disdain at the Southside.
That’s the key social, cultural, and economic problem that Project DeRenne would help address.