The Creative Coast’s blogspot is Savannah’s sounding board for local thinkers, innovators, wanderers and wonderers. Guest bloggers share their thoughts, opinions and creative noodling from all over the map. This week’s blog is from Bret Bell, history buff, human heat shield and public information director for the City of Savannah. Follow Bret as he takes us on a journey through Underground Savannah…
A few months ago, the City of Savannah’s Facebook page received a message from a man named James Laswell who had last visited Savannah as a Marine in 1974. He was planning his first trip back, and asked us for help so he could show his wife the Savannah he remembered: “What I recall is descending wooden steps to a boardwalk hanging over the water,” he wrote. “Along that boardwalk, dug into the bank, were several clubs. We called it Underground Savannah. Now I can find no info about them. A trip to Savannah would be incomplete without showing my wife Underground Savannah.”
It took some back and forth before we both realized “Underground Savannah” was Factors Walk – the network of stone walls, iron bridges, cobbled ramps, tiered lanes and impossibly steep stairs between Bay and River streets. Forty years later, this guy did not remember the squares, the row houses, or the wispy moss in the gnarled trees. James Laswell remembered Factors Walk. And he remembered it as a secret underground world.
Until joining the City six years ago, and moving into a City Hall office that essentially opens onto Factors Walk, I hadn’t given this historic oddball much thought. Like many locals, I had long ago given our waterfront up to the tourists. It is these tourists, however, who got me to revisit this in-between world that transitions Savannah to the river.
Tourists carry a different expression while gliding the bricks of Jones Street vs. navigating the ballast stones of Drayton Ramp. Up there, it’s a recognition of unique beauty. Down here, it’s a bit of bewilderment, combined with fear of falling. Factors Walk seems ancient, like a Revolutionary fort, but with the backdoor feel of a lane, which it is: dumpsters, air compressors, parking spaces, workers on smoke breaks are all found here.
When I was flown in to Savannah for a job interview 13 years ago, they put me up at the old Day’s Inn on Bay Street. I checked in just as it was getting dark, and wandered over to the labyrinth near Jere’s Antiques. The criss-crossing catwalks at odd levels (there is a Lower, Middle and Upper Factors Walk), the hand-cut masonry, the people stumbling around with alcohol in hand — it reminded me at the time of the pillaging scene on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney.
Unlike the rest of the Historic District, which Oglethorpe laid out with carefully planned OCD orderliness, Factors Walk has more of an improvised quality. While our squares and streets are named after Savannah’s heroes and wealthy, this area took the name of the common factors — blue collar businessmen who conducted trade from the warehouses along the waterfront.
Its construction was pure utilitarian. By the mid-1800s, the Port of Savannah was an exporting machine at a level that would impress Curtis Foltz. We didn’t import much, however, so the European ships headed our way sailed across the Atlantic with empty hulls, which made for tippy ships. To provide ballast, they would load up the hold with heavy stones, then unload them on the Savannah waterfront to make room for our cotton, rosin and timber.
As exports increased, the stones began piling on the riverbank in mounds big enough to make it difficult to get around. At the same time, the 40-foot bluff upon which Savannah was built began seriously eroding under the weight of all this up and down activity. So Savannah came up with a win-win: use the abundance of ballast stones to stabilize the bluff and create some roads and walkways to make it easier to move goods.
One can only guess how these ballast stones began their journey across the Atlantic. Two years ago City workers were repairing a section of the Whitaker Street Ramp where it meets River Street, next to the Bohemian Hotel, and noticed that one granite block they pulled up had Chinese characters carved on its face. The workers brought the stone to our Library and Archives Director, Luciana Spracher, who discovered it to be a grave marker for a man named Zhang Lin’an who died in 1798. The marker was likely placed there when the ramp was repaved in 1867. How this Chinese headstone ended as ship ballast and then pavement for 150 years of River Street revelers remains a mystery, but sounds like the opening scene of an epic novel. The marker was recently put on display in City Council Chambers, as part our international exhibit.
Walking the three-quarter-mile length of Factors Walk reminds me of a geology class I took while going to college in Colorado. Our professor would take us to road cuts through the Front Range foothills, where the layers of igneous and sediment were exposed, and attempt to piece together their geologic history.
Savannah’s history is found in the layers of Factors Walk’s stone walls. Perfectly cut limestone, granite and marble squares give way to rounded cobbles which butt up again big Savannah Greys which transition to 20th century red bricks and more modern cement blocks. A Factors Walk survey commissioned by the MPC last year notes several “ghost walls” that emerge and then disappear into nothingness. When we needed bigger walls, we didn’t start from scratch. We simply built on top.
The surveyors also observed a number of entrances into the wall that are now bricked in, likely blocking either storage space or underground tunnels. The 131-page document is largely a dry, technical read, but on this matter the authors can’t contain themselves: “Little information is known about these tunnels. The use of these tunnels is rumored as either passageway to: smuggle or hide slaves and/or pirates, or to secretly transport the many dead from hospitals during the yellow fever in order to deter the city from widespread panic.”
In the wall next to City Hall, on the Drayton Street Ramp, are four large vaults with unusually high ceilings known as the Cluskey Embankment Stores. While we know they were commissioned by the City in 1842, and have been used for covered parking since 1962, we don’t know much about how they were used in the 120 years in between. Documents are rather vague, and photos are frustrating: our Archivist has discovered several turn-of-the-century photos of Drayton Ramp, but in each one the vaults are slightly out of frame. Many believe that for a time they were used to hold slaves for auction, a story that is passed on in a few walking tours, but we have no documentation indicating either way.
To help solve this mystery, the City earlier this year contracted with an archaeology team from Georgia Southern University to excavate the vaults. Thus far the team has dug up lots of items, including glass, metal, bone materials, and a mass of pharmacy bottles encased in a concrete-like mixture. Our goal when the archaeological work is done is to create an interpretive display that helps tell the story of both the vaults and Factors Walk. We have decided to no longer use these curiosities for parking.
We have been working on plans to improve Factors Walk, drafting standards for signage, bridges, the placement and screening of HVAC units and refuse facilities, new lighting, some of which has already been installed. The City classifies the Factors Walk wall as a monument – by far our largest – and like all monuments, it is in a constant state of erosion that requires attention: Currently we have two stabilization projects in progress to repair major vertical cracks that have developed in the wall near the Old Harbor Light and next to the stairs beside City Hall. Later this year we will begin work on the walls at the Abercorn and Barnard ramps.
There are dozens of businesses that call Factors Walk home, just as it was in the 1850s, and still a few bars located here. When James Laswell returns to find the Underground Savannah of his Marine days, he’ll discover that not all that much has changed. The stairs are still uncomfortably steep. The stones are still ankle-twisting uneven. The mysteries still abound.
Bret
