The Ardsley Park-Chatham Crescent Historic District is made up of two separately developed but adjacent subdivisions planned and laid out in the years around 1910, to the south-east of Savannah's Thomas Square Streetcar Historic District.
Both Ardsley Park and Chatham Crescent employ the small parks distributed evenly in the older Historic District. Ardsley Park was laid out first, by the Lattimore Brothers and the Ardsley Park Land Corporation. Chatham Crescent, developed by Harvey Granger, followed very soon after.
The architecture of both historic neighborhoods is primarily residential, composed of mostly single-family houses built for Savannah’s wealthiest white citizens (both districts were at the time exclusively for whites).
A range of architectural styles are employed in the districts, drawing primarily from the revival and eclectic styles most popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, when most of the area was developed.
History Of Ardsley Park
Late in 1909 the Ardsley Park Land Corporation, led by William, Harry Hayes and Ralston Lattimore, announced its plans for a new suburb for Savannah. This subdivision, rival to the adjacent Chatham Crescent, would reproduce the square plan of the original city, several small parks to be laid out at frequent intervals across the 89-acre tract.
Ardsley Park, the much smaller and westernmost of the two suburbs, has half a dozen small parks laid out on alternating sides of Abercorn Street.
The development wiped out the black Sunnyside district, a roughly 12-acre area of more than 200 modest rental houses settled by many of Savannah's African Americans over the preceding decade.
The Lattimores bought Sunnyside for $59,000; early in 1910 its residents were evicted and their cottages demolished.
Sunnyside's eradication was praised by many Savannah whites, who thought the removal of the community would be as much of an improvement to the section south of Savannah as the new subdivision and its large, expensive homes.
Chatham Crescent
Chatham Crescent’s design was inspired by the City Beautiful Movement that gripped many of the larger American cities in the early years of the twentieth century. The movement favored formal vistas and avenues and monumental architecture as a means to improve society by creating a more ordered and beautiful city.
In Chatham Crescent, this translated – on a rather smaller scale – into the crescent-shaped avenue that gave the district its name, along with smaller parks and parkways, overlying the standard city grid.
References
‘Beautiful residence section is planned,’ Savannah Morning News, December 10 1909, p12.