Forsyth Park and the Victorian District

In 1851, the City allocated most of the remaining portion of the common south of Gaston Street for a large municipal park. The areas flanking Forsyth Park accommodated the first true suburbs of Savannah, marked by detached houses set back from the sidewalk with front gardens and iron fences defining the edge of the property. The outward growth of Savannah was facilitated by the installation of the city’s first streetcar line on Whitaker Street, along the western edge of Forsyth Park.

The Victorian District was platted between 1868 and 1872 as far south as Anderson Street with the majority of building occurring between 1870 and 1897. This extension was less a walking city than a streetcar suburb of individual houses built on open lots. Set outside the city’s fire limits and regulations, most of these were wooden and relatively inexpensive, catering to a rising middle class flush with cash readily available through the nineteenth-century innovation of savings and loan associations. The area along Barnard Street between Hall and Waldburg streets, as well as the blocks of streets that cross it in this area, offer one of the best-preserved concentrations of late-nineteenth-century wooden architecture in Savannah. Italianate detached and row houses predominate, many with distinctive projecting polygonal bays rising the full height of the building.