silkroad power leveling if necessary
use the money to buy endangered houses, then resell them?aat a loss, if necessary?ato people who would sign a
pledge to begin restoration within eighteen months. The foundation set a goal of $200,000 for the fund, enough
money in those days to save a lot of houses if they were turned over quickly enough. And they were.
“But even with the revolving fund, it was a struggle,” said Adler. “I’d come downtown every day and breathe in
the air and plot out the day’s fight. And it was indeed a fight,silkroad power leveling, because the buildings were still coming down pretty
fast. Sometimes we won. Sometimes we lost. And the voters of Savannah gave us no help at all. They rejected
urban renewal three times because they thought it was a communist plot,rs gold, and they defeated any number of
proposals for historic-zoning ordinances. That monstrosity over there, for instance,runescape power leveling, was one of our biggest losses.
The Hyatt Regency Hotel.”
We were riding along Bay Street, passing in front of the Hyatt?aa squat, modernist building next to City Hall.
The Hyatt had been a great cause celebre in Savannah. The building had taken a great chunk out of the row of
nineteenth-century cotton warehouses along Factors’ Walk, and its backside jutted out over River Street,
?77 312200 3
interrupting the line of facades along the riverfront. The public battle over the hotel delayed its construction for
ten years.
“You can see the hotel is all wrong for the site,” said Adler. “We fought it in the courts, and let me tell you it was
a bruising battle. Both of the developers were members of Historic Savannah Foundation. The sister of one of
them was the acting director. The organization was split right down the middle. Practically destroyed. It was a
very emotional time. I remember going to a wedding while all that was happening, and when I walked in I
realized I was suing everybody in the room but the bride and the minister.”
At about that time, restoration of the historic district was nearing completion. Over a thousand houses had been
restored. The work had been done by affluent whites, but Adler insisted that blacks had not been displaced.
Historic Savannah was buying empty buildings for the most part. But when the supply of unrestored houses in
the historic district began to dwindle, the next logical step was to restore the houses in the neighboring Victorian
district. And that would have been a different story.
We drove south on Abercorn Street. Within a few blocks, the restrained architecture of the historic district gave
way to late-Victorian flights of fancy?abig old wooden houses with romantic towers, gables, and elaborate
gingerbread trim. A few were restored, but most were in very poor condition.
The Victorian district was Savannah’s first streetcar suburb. It had been built for the white working class between
1870 and 1910. After World War II, when the whites moved farther out into the suburbs,silkroad gold, absentee landlords took
over, and by 1975 the area had become a black slum. The houses were in deplorable shape, but they were still
beautiful, and in recent years speculators and upper-income whites started buying them. At that point, Adler
became alarmed. “It would have meant gentrification and massive displacement of blacks,” he said, “and I was
determined to prevent that. I asked Historic Savannah to help find a way to restore this area without evicting the