What makes a city a city, gives it an indelible, like-no-other-place character?  It’s some kind of alchemy between landscape, location, culture and planning.  In Savannah one essential element is the giant old live oak trees draped with clouds of spanish moss along the sidewalks and in the squares.

Along with ravaged socialites and fresh-faced SCAD students, these great, graceful trees are real city characters.  Their enormous branches are twisted into demented, expressive shapes, as if they had been imagined by Edward Gorey.  At daybreak the clouds of moss filter sunlight so that only a soft, skittish haze reaches the ground below.  At dusk they sway slightly in the breeze and give off the faintest, phosphorescent glow, as if they’re sentient creatures, suffocating the trees and poisoning the air.  It’s an old world, gothic feeling that’s part of the city’s allure.

I’m not a big one for city planning, believing that cities are super-complex organisms that develop entropically, and magically, overtime.  But there is something about Savannah.  Here the city planners got it just right: the height of the buildings, the width of the streets and sidewalks, the size of the squares, the depth of the lots, the distance from one open space to the next, and the depth and width of the city itself.  One morning I walked from the riverfront down Bull Street to Fairmont Park and then back again, taking in the entire historic city, and left off feeling enchanted rather than overwhelmed.

Along with its gorgeous greenery, what saves the city from being an oppressively relentless grid is the unfussy state of its buildings.  Unlike in Charleston, its northern sister, the buildings in Savannah are not all scrubbed clean and prettily restored.  Some quite grand ones remain a bit of a mess, with peeling paint and moldy block construction.  This city’s judicious plan, coupled with this faint pallor of going-to-seed, makes it like no other.