Savannah’s Free People will be at 217 West Broughton St., right next to Urban Outfitters, in the space last occupied by the Clothing Warehouse.

Free People is under the same corporate umbrella as Urban Outfitters, so the location seems more than apt. Anthropologie, which is slated for the southeast corner of Congress and Montgomery, is also under that same corporate leadership.

Free People was actually the original name of the store that evolved into Urban Outfitters. Free People was reborn as a woman’s boutique just after the turn of the century.

Here’s an image from last week’s submittal to the HRB:

St. Charles is probably best known for its streetcar line, but construction has forced the temporary suspension of service on the western end of the street and on Carrollton Avenue.

Without the usual groups of people standing in the neutral ground waiting for streetcars, both avenues seemed oddly empty.

There was another change to St. Charles since my last trip to New Orleans a couple of years ago: far more cyclists. And this is summertime, when many college students at Tulane and Loyola are out of town.

On the portions of the street nearest Tulane, there’s now a bike lane going each way on St. Charles. It runs right alongside the parked cars — the exact configuration that we have in Savannah on Price Street and Washington Avenue.

So, as you can see in the photo below, long stretches of St. Charles now have the following configuration, working our way from left to right: sidewalk, tree lawn, parking lane (which wisely does not even have lines to delineate spaces, thus allowing for more cars), bicycle lane, vehicular travel lane, large median with streetcar tracks and with vehicular cut throughs for cross and turning traffic.

Here’s a shot taken a few evenings ago looking east, with the gates to Audubon Park visible on the right:

Let me add two other notes:

• Even when streetcars are active, the neutral ground is wide enough, flat enough, and comfortable enough to make an excellent jogging path.
• The width of the neutral ground, i.e. median, is sufficient to handle cross traffic and turning traffic in ways that make streetlights unnecessary except at significant intersections.

So here we have an historic street that far predates the automobile era — and an incredibly beautiful street too. The design has adapted beautifully for cars, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, even joggers.

It’s rather remarkable.

The configuration is one that could be adapted almost exactly to Abercorn Street between Victory Drive and DeRenne Avenue in Savannah. Modified versions could work on other streets.

Savannah’s food culture has developed in positive ways in recent years, with larger numbers of residents investing in some way in healthier, more local fare. Whole Foods is still a major grocery chain, of course, but its presence in Savannah will encourage those broader trends, force other grocers to step up their games, and make some local naysayers view the city more positively.

It’s a big deal.

Oddly, Savannah still hasn’t appeared on Whole Foods’ list of “stores in development,” but the company has listed 19 different job openings, some of which presumably represent multiple positions. There’s general information about employment at the Whole Foods website.

By the way, I was in New Orleans for part of last week. While I didn’t visit the existing Whole Foods, I did see the site of a new one that’s a key part of redevelopment on North Broad Street. I hear a lot of Savannahians say they’d rather have a Trader Joe’s than a Whole Foods, but New Orleans — one of the great foodie towns in the entire nation — doesn’t have a single Trader Joe’s.

Maybe the age of those systems is contributing to the new search system’s abject failures here on day one.

If I do just one search — even just a simple search to get to a friend’s profile — I’m not able to do a second search without entirely reloading the Home page.

And if I’ve reloaded and click in the search bar, here’s the dropdown menu that appears:

If I click on “Movies My Friends Like” (surely that must be worth viewing, right?), I get a list topped by the 48 Hour Film Project Savannah (which is not a movie), CBGB the Movie (which only a handful of my friends have even seen since distribution is still months away), and Savannah the Movie (ditto).

And here’s the problem with Facebook’s prioritization in search of things that we have “liked”: often users “like” things that they don’t necessarily like. Yes, I want to keep caught up on new developments regarding CBGB, but I haven’t even seen the film; I want to follow the page, but I have NO idea if I actually like the movie.

From that lame list of Movies My Friends Like, when I try to type something else into the search bar, Facebook won’t even let me change it.

Once I’m back out to a clean search box, I can type in something like “Restaurants in Savannah that [insert friend's name] likes”.

But that’s just more of a muddle. The list of results is a mishmash that includes places that this particular friend might have “liked” but are hardly her favorite spots. The second page of the results includes SubDogs (which is closed), Abe’s (which is not a restaurant), and Live Wire Music Hall (which is closed and which is not a restaurant).

How will any of this information prove truly useful?

I will be curious to hear others’ experiences with the new search function. Its debut on my screen has just made Facebook even more cumbersome.

I’ve been following The Wild’s energetic, passionate music for about a year and a half — ever since the band opened for The Queers in a great night at The Wormhole here in Savannah.

The sound is a beautiful melding of folk and punk. The punk label fits because of The Wild’s unbridled, anti-establishment energy — many of the songs touch on social causes and on the dehumanizing dangers of overarching bureaucracies. But the work is more idealistic than cynical, more innocent than jaded. Add in the acoustic elements and the sometimes lilting vocals, and the sound is in the tradition of American folk music, not afraid to ask the big questions: Why? and Why not?

From the opening track “There’s a Darkness (But There’s Also a Light)”:

One song deals with migrants crossing the border and later facing violent expulsion from the country; another catches the spirit of protestors at Fort Benning, home to the controversial School of the Americas.

But the majority of the songs are about more existential journeys — about making the most of the time we have and loving the people around us along the way.

I used to kill myself to feel like I was alive,
But since I lost you friend, I learned it was a lie…
All those walls we build so tall and wide,
It’s a coward’s way to be alive.

The Wild is Bryan Scherer (Drums, Guitar, Vocals), Dianna Settles (Vocals and Tambourine), Steve D’agostino (Banjo, Pedal Steel, Vocals, Fiddle, and Guitar), Dakota Floyd (Bass, Vocals, and Bad Puns), and Witt Wisebram (Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica, and Piano).

Take a listen:

But the New Orleans-style processional after the funeral service at Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension was joyous and beautiful.

And it was an amazing display of Savannah itself.

If you’re from Savannah and personally invested at all in civic life, you’re likely to recognize at least a couple of dozen people in the pics below. I’m not going to try to point out who they all are right now.

After Ben’s family and friends go through a period of mourning, we’ll begin thinking about ways to permanently honor him, which would be richly deserved.

But there was something beautiful yesterday in the procession from the church to Ellis Square, where some of the city’s best players performed in Ben’s honor just a few yards from the Johnny Mercer statue.

I ended up with a lot of photos that are nearly identical, and I literally ended up with well over 100 that I wanted to post, but that’s a little excessive . . . But I found it too hard to whittle it down much

It will also be interesting to see, given the number of photographers and other folks with cameras around, how many photos get publicly posted. Mangue Banzima has some great shots up at his Qui Style blog. I’ve seen a few great isolated shots posted by media outlets and one beautiful album shared semi-privately by a photographer on Facebook, but I’m hoping we’ll see more.

The extended happy hour at The Jinx to launch the album was simply great fun. Predictably, there was a huge, diverse crowd throughout the evening.

Damon Mailand, Anders Thomsen, Mike DiSanza, Igor Fiksman, and Charlie Hodge were joined by a number of other musicians during the four hours of nonstop live music. My apologies if I leave anyone out, but those on stage included Ricardo Ochoa on violin, singer Shannon Schebell, drummer Matt Collett, bassist Mike Redmond, singer Ray Lundy from Bottles ‘n’ Cans, plus the full lineup of Tonto for a short set — Thomsen, Corey Barhorst and Lee Vallier.

Special support was provided by Fred Hodge, who wandered the crowd hawking CDs.

At the end, Igor jumped up from his pedal steel for his typically entertaining rendition of Judas Priest’s “Breakin’ the Law.”

If you can’t get a copy from the band at one of their live shows, you can find the album on Amazon and

I took some pictures:

I just checked the satellite radar and there are only a couple of dots on it — one of them is drenching downtown Savannah.

It seems almost fitting.

Ben Tucker was laid to rest today in Savannah (if you don’t know who he was, check out my post from last week), with a series of events. The funeral service was at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension on Wright Square at 11. Outside, dozens of us waited for the service to end and then joined a New Orleans-style processional down State Street and then up Barnard to Ellis Square.

As the marching band stopped its singing and playing, the band on stage got rolling.

The crowd thinned out relatively fast — it was a hot day and a work day for many — but the music was beautiful. I stayed long enough to catch up with some old friends and to hear a beautiful rendition of Ben’s classic song “Comin’ Home Baby.”

I took a bunch of photos — as a zillion others did — but I’m not going to edit all of those until tomorrow sometime. I’ll also wait till then to weigh in again on some of the issues surrounding the horrible accident that ended his life.

I like these two, though. That’s

Best to all.