Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (22 page)

Early one bright April morning, Lee Adler came toward me with a broad smile on his face and an arm outstretched in greeting. “Shake the hand that’s going to shake the hand of the Prince of Wales!” he said.

Mr. Adler was making a jocular reference to an article in the morning paper announcing that he and his wife would be traveling to Washington at the end of the week to meet Prince Charles of England. The Adlers and the prince were to participate in a discussion of low-income housing. Adler assumed I had read the article, and of course I had. Most of Savannah had read it, and to judge from Mr. Adler’s ebullient mood, he either did not know or did not care what certain people were saying about it.

“It’s just another of Leopold’s cheap, self-promotional ploys,” Jim Williams said. But the rolling of eyes and clearing of throats was not limited to people who disliked Lee Adler. Katherine Gore, a lifelong friend of the Adlers, also found the news distasteful. “I would like to meet Prince Charles too,” she said, “but I would never stoop so low to do it. Low-income housing, indeed!”

Adler and I were standing in Adler’s office on the ground floor of his townhouse. This was the command post from which he directed his many projects in real estate and historic preservation. A telephone rang in another room. Somewhere a copy machine churned. The walls of his office were decorated with memorabilia of Adler’s role in the remarkable renaissance of Savannah’s historic district. The photographs documented parallel transformations that had taken place over the past twenty-five years: Savannah regaining the splendor of its youth and a youthful Lee Adler progressing by stages into silver-haired middle age.

Adler wore half-moon glasses and a pale, rumpled summer suit. His speech was a soft, cajoling drawl. We had met a week earlier at a garden party given by a local historian, and Adler had offered to take me on a tour of Savannah to show me, stage
by stage, how Savannah had been saved from the wrecker’s ball. As we got into his car, he let me know he was aware of all the carping going on behind his back.

“Do you know what the saying for the day is?” he asked.
“‘It ain’t braggin’ if y’really done it!’”
He gave me a meaningful glance over the top of his glasses, as if to say: Never mind all the backbiting you’ve been hearing. It’s sour grapes.

We pulled away from the curb and began moving through the streets at ten miles an hour. As we did, the visual treasures of Savannah flowed by in slow motion—townhouses, mansions, shadowed gardens, well-tended squares.

“Picture all of this deserted and empty,” said Adler. “Imagine it run-down—windows broken, weatherboards unpainted and rotting, shutters falling off, roofs caving in. Think what the squares would look like if they were nothing but hard-packed dirt instead of grass and azaleas and beautiful landscaping. Because that’s the way it used to be. That’s why Lady Astor called Savannah ‘a beautiful woman with a dirty face’ when she came here after the Second World War. That’s what Savannah had allowed itself to become. And what’s frightening is that while it was happening, nobody gave one goddamn.”

A truck behind us honked its horn. Adler pulled over to let it pass, then kept moving at a slow pace, continuing the story of Savannah’s decline. Until the 1920s, he said, Savannah had remained basically intact—an architecturally exquisite nineteenth-century town. But the flight to the suburbs was just then beginning. People moved out of the lovely old houses downtown. They cut them into apartments, tore them down, or just boarded them up and left them empty. In those days all the money was being funneled into the development of the suburbs, which was fortunate for Savannah in one respect: It meant there was no clamor to bulldoze massive areas downtown for housing developments. Nor did Savannah have superhighways slicing through the center of it the way other cities did, because Savannah was not on the way to somewhere else. It was geographically the end of the line.

In the mid-1950s, almost a third of the old city was gone. Then in 1954, the owners of a funeral parlor announced plans to knock down a dilapidated tenement so they could use the space for a parking lot, and a number of concerned citizens rose up in protest. The tenement happened to be Davenport House, one of the finest examples of Federal architecture in America. It was a shambles at the time; eleven families were crowded into it. Seven ladies got together, Lee Adler’s mother being one of them, and saved Davenport House and restored it. They then formed the Historic Savannah Foundation, and that was the beginning of Savannah’s salvation.

In the early days, Historic Savannah had a vigilante committee that sounded the alarm when an old house was about to be demolished. But the committee had no power to prevent demolition of houses, or even to gain a stay of execution. All it could do was try to find some sympathetic soul who would buy the endangered building and restore it. Most of the time the house came down before the committee could find anybody to save it. It soon became clear that the only way to save old houses was to
buy
them. And that was when Lee Adler became involved.

“I was having breakfast one morning,” he said. “It was December of 1959. I read in the newspaper that a row of four townhouses on Oglethorpe Avenue was about to be torn down. They were lovely. Built in 1855. They were known as the Mary Marshall Row. It was the same old story: A local wrecker had bought the houses in order to knock them down and sell the bricks. The
bricks!
You see, they’re Savannah gray bricks, which are larger and more porous than ordinary bricks, and they have a very soft and beautiful color. They were kilned at the Hermitage Plantation on the Savannah River. They’re not made anymore, and you can’t duplicate them. They were selling for ten cents each at the time, more than three times the cost of an ordinary brick. Anyhow, the wrecker had already demolished the carriage houses, and the townhouses themselves would be gone in a matter of days.”

Adler pulled over to the curb on Oglethorpe Avenue in front
of Colonial Cemetery. Across the street stood a handsome row of four brick townhouses, each with a stoop of white marble steps leading up to the main entrance on the second floor. The bricks were a muted, grayish red. “There they are,” he said, “fully restored. When I came to look at them that day, the windows were out, the doors were gone, and the steps were in bad shape. The bricks from the carriage houses were piled up in the backyard. I went into one of the houses and climbed up to the third floor and looked out at the magnificent view. And I thought, ‘This can’t be allowed to happen.’”

Adler paid a call on old Mr. Monroe, the wrecker, and told him he wanted to buy the whole row. Mr. Monroe told him he could get the bricks to him in six weeks. “I don’t want you to
touch
those bricks!” Adler replied. “I want you to leave them right where they are.” Mr. Monroe agreed, but said Adler would have to buy the land too; he could have the whole row, bricks and land, for $54,000. So Adler and three other men signed a note for it. Then they wrote a prospectus and took it to Historic Savannah Foundation, which had three hundred members at the time, proposing that the foundation buy the row—at a cost of $180 a member. “My idea,” said Adler, “was that the foundation would resell the houses to people who would agree to restore them. Historic Savannah went along with it.” That was the beginning of the revolving fund.

It happened that the poet Conrad Aiken had lived as a child in the house right next to Marshall Row—at number 228, the house in which Aiken’s father had shot his mother and then himself on that terrible morning in February 1901. Having spent most of his life up north, Aiken wanted to come back and live his last years in Savannah. So a millionaire friend, a man named Hy Sobiloff, bought and restored the house on the end of Marshall Row for Aiken and his wife, Mary. It was number 230, the house next door to the one Aiken had lived in as a boy.

“When work was completed on the house,” said Adler, “the contrast between it and the other three was startling. I went to the phone and called the newspaper and said, ‘Do you want to
see a miracle? Come on!’ So they came over, and they did a big feature on it in their Sunday edition. That was in February 1962. We had an open house the day the story appeared. It rained, but something like seven thousand people came through the house. They wore the shellac off the banister. We let them go into the unrestored house next door, too, for a before-and-after comparison. And they saw for the first time how a dilapidated wreck could be transformed into something marvelous. When that happened, we started to get some interest. People began to see the potential. They began to think about moving back downtown. Of course, it didn’t hurt one bit that Savannah’s greatest man of letters, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was leading the way.”

We resumed our drive. Adler pointed out dozens of houses that had been saved, describing in detail their once-fallen condition. “The porch on that one was completely gone …that house had bright green asbestos siding and aluminum awnings … the roof on that one was rotted through ….” He was like a doctor reviewing the case histories of former patients, now fully recovered.

Adler’s success with Marshall Row encouraged him to go out and raise money for a revolving fund to be used by Historic Savannah to save other houses in the same way. The concept was very simple: Historic Savannah would use the money to buy endangered houses, then resell them—at a loss, if necessary—to 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, 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, and they defeated any number of proposals for historic-zoning ordinances.
That
monstrosity
over there, for instance, was one of our biggest losses. The Hyatt Regency Hotel.”

We were riding along Bay Street, passing in front of the Hyatt—a squat, modernist building next to City Hall. The Hyatt had been a great
cause célèbre
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, interrupting the line of façades 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—big 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, 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 people who lived here, but Historic Savannah was still busted up over the Hyatt, and they weren’t interested in the housing problems of poor people. That’s when I quit Historic Savannah. I launched a nonprofit organization called the Savannah Landmark Rehabilitation Project, which has been a triumph, because the board includes everybody—black, white, you name it, rich and poor.”

Adler’s intention was to get houses out of the hands of the absentee slumlords and convert the Victorian district into a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. It occurred to him that the project might qualify for public assistance, and thus far, by using a combination of public and private funding, he had bought and renovated three hundred units. Tenants paid 30 percent of their income in rent, and the rest was made up by federal rent subsidies.