Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Cuyler-brownville, and West Savannah

Former slaves migrated to Savannah following the Civil War and settled in the outlying communities of Brownville in 1867 and Dillontown in 1868. Brownville was platted without squares in a grid with lots oriented toward north-south streets. Dillontown’s grid plan included three squares (never created) and lots oriented toward east-west streets. Both tracts were absorbed into the City of Savannah in 1886. Clusters of worker housing indicative of a single-building campaign for an individual patron are common in the eastern and western edges of Savannah’s downtown. Many can be found throughout Cuyler-Brownville (also called Cuyler-Brownsville), with perhaps the earliest being the extensive rows of single-story side-gabled houses built for African Americans by a young Peter Wiltberger Meldrim (later the city’s mayor) along W. 33rd and W. 34th streets from the late 1880s. Two-story row houses by other speculators followed in the 1910s, with front double porticos, weatherboard cladding, two-over-two double-hung windows, and off-centered chimneys. The predominant house types included single-story shotguns and hall-parlor and Georgian-plan cottages, as well as some two-story side-hall town houses and stacked flats. The neighborhood’s name honors the Cuyler Street School.

The area suffered many years of severe decline, prompting the City to implement an urban redevelopment plan in 1997, including thirty new single-family houses. Mercy Housing, founded by the Sisters of Mercy of Nebraska, stepped in to provide a multifamily component and helped serve as a catalyst for continued reinvestment in the neighborhood. Mercy’s inclusion of community services enhanced residents’ abilities to improve education and life skills and become active participants in their neighborhoods, which in turn allowed for more diverse housing choices in the future. To help guide new development in the area, the City also established the “Cuyler-Brownsville planned neighborhood conservation district” in 1997, complete with development standards and visual compatibility design guidelines.

West Broad Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, first appeared in a surveyor’s map of 1777 as a one-hundred-foot-wide street. Its development into the premier African American commercial corridor in segregated Savannah was ironically weakened as integration allowed blacks more business opportunities, and further suffered from heavy-handed urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century. Savannah is currently attempting to balance the successful and diverse part of the street north of Liberty Street with the more challenged southern portion. The weakening of West Broad’s economy made the boulevard vulnerable to radical urban interventions. By 1960, I-16 was unanimously approved and by 1963 Union Station was demolished for a flyover off-ramp (7.4) to Montgomery Street. This loss exacted a devastating physical, economic, social, and psychological toll on the area. The nearly five hundred identifiable addresses on the street in 1914 were reduced to less than a hundred by 2010. Rental rates to the south of the flyover fell to half those to the north. Revitalization began in 1992 with the newly established Savannah Development and Renewal Authority. One ongoing project promotes removing the I-16 flyover to reclaim Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as a major mixed-use economic corridor and a gateway to the city. Nonetheless, the City of Savannah’s 2015 demolition of nineteen of the attached cottages erected by Meldrim on 33rd and 34th streets—to make room for a police precinct—reflects the continued fragility of heritage preservation in this area.