By the late nineteenth century, development in Savannah extended as far south as Estill Avenue (present-day Victory Drive). In 1901, the City extended its southern limit to what is now 52nd Street, and by 1903 it proposed a conventional grid plan for the area. Just south of Estill Avenue and east of Bull Street, a small African American community named Sunnyside evidently prevented the plan’s implementation. The community of roughly two hundred and fifty small wooden houses with streets and service structures had been erected in 1898 by the federal government for a planned hospital complex to serve anticipated casualties of the Spanish-American War, but the conflict ended before the complex was completed. Lying outside the city limits of the time, the hospital complex was purchased in 1900 by Horace Rivers (a real estate developer) and other investors, who sold the houses to low-income families, mostly African Americans. But this “negro settlement, known as Sunnyside” was deemed by Mayor George Tiedeman in his annual report of 1909 as having “long retarded the growth of the city in that section.” In early 1910, the City granted brothers Harry Hays and William Lattimore permission to remove Sunnyside and develop the much larger and more affluent Ardsley Park neighborhood in its place. The early-twentieth-century creation of Ardsley Park, Chatham Crescent, and Parkside as the city’s first consciously segregated white-only suburban neighborhoods (regulated by covenants to last twenty years) reflects the growing influence of Jim Crow segregationist values, but other forces were also at play in fostering these suburbs.
Progressive Era reformers sought to address social problems through improvements to the built environment, including access to recreation, parkland, and better-quality housing. These ideas had been promoted since the 1870s with the development of garden suburbs that aimed to separate residential neighborhoods from a city’s industrial areas and increase the role of nature in an urban setting. By the early 1900s, however, these reformers also believed aesthetic improvements through civic grandeur were essential for enhancing the quality of life. These values strongly shaped the development of Ardsley Park and especially Chatham Crescent, as well as Gordonston (13.4), laid out in 1917. The first step was the 1907 creation of a major new municipal space, Daffin Park, as an anchor to the twentieth-century expansion of Savannah.
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