Originally laid out as garden lots, the Beach Institute neighborhood today comprises thirty-three acres of land divided into eleven blocks bordered by Liberty, East Broad, Gwinnett, and Price streets. In the late eighteenth century, the property passed from Sir James Wright, the last royal governor of Georgia, to Josiah Tattnall. Revolutionaries confiscated and then sold it in 1782 as Fair Lawn Plantation. In 1853, the Savannah and Albany Railroad (later the Savannah, Florida and Western and then the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad) established a terminal at Liberty and East Broad streets and neighborhood development began. Five tracts between the railroad complex and Price Street were developed. Planning took the form of long blocks with streets and lanes aligning with those of the wards to the west, but did not continue the pattern of squares used in the rest of the historic district.
The Beach Institute’s development primarily involved frame housing for railroad workers. Tax rolls show that African Americans, Irish, and Germans developed twenty-two lots between 1854 and 1861 and a total of fifty-one by 1866. Progress was slow until 1871, when city officials allowed frame construction south of South Broad Street (Oglethorpe Avenue) and east of Price Street. The neighborhood includes large numbers of double tenements with shared chimneys, row houses, and Savannah’s greatest concentration of single-story side-gabled cottages.
The neighborhood population declined in the second half of the twentieth century from 1,500 in 1970 to half that number twenty years later. Ethnic diversity declined as well, and by 1990 the neighborhood was 96 percent African American. In 1978, preservationist and African American local civil rights leader W. W. Law called for an effort to save the neighborhood. The preservation of a few key buildings, new infill construction, and the rise of property values in the historic district have all helped rejuvenate this area.
South of this neighborhood was one of Savannah’s first segregated black communities. As emancipation and transportation systems increasingly fostered large-scale racial segregation, black professional families moved to what originally was called Waringville, named for its founder, Savannah alderman and physician James J. Waring, who purchased the land in 1866. Waring’s platting of this area innovated with twenty-five-foot setbacks allowing for ample openness and greenery, as well as paving using a variety of materials. Having experienced many years of yellow fever epidemics, Waring (no known relation to the eminent New York sanitation engineer of this period, George E. Waring) also promoted water and sewage systems, which were incorporated as the neighborhood became Waring Ward in 1871. Waring’s health concerns also led to the dredging of the Bilbo Canal just to the east of Waringville in 1874. The neighborhood’s centerpiece came in 1906 when the City purchased a group of lots and created Dixon Park as a recreational square, eventually giving its name to the neighborhood.
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