Chatham Crescent is a suburban development, one of the first in Savannah designed to take advantage of the new availability of personal automobiles as a means of transportation from home to work. It is now part of the Ardsley Park-Chatham Crescent Historic District.
The suburb was built by Harvey Granger and his Chatham Land and Hotel Company in the second decade of the twentieth century. It was styled on the briefly popular “City Beautiful” ideal of monumental street planning and architecture.
Granger pushed through the construction of his new suburb with amazing rapidity. He often employed over 100 men at once on the street grading, sewer installation and surface preparation necessary to make the land suitable for house building.
Chatham Crescent differed in several particulars from the plan by which the rest of Savannah was laid out.
Granger did not recreate the square plan of Oglethorpe’s invention, though he did have several small parks laid out within the tract. The squares as laid out in the northern part of the city were impractical for an automobile suburb.
The streets themselves were narrower than those in the rest of the city. This was primarily a cost saving measure. A large percentage of the land in a new subdivision was used up by the streets and sidewalks: narrower streets meant more land remaining to sell to lot buyers. The grass plats between sidewalk and curbing were likewise dispensed with.
Numerous restrictions applied to those wanting to buy a lot in the new development. These restrictions were outlined in a promotional brochure (The playground of America: a description of Savannah and its surroundings, including Chatham Crescent, the most desirable spot in the United States for the erection of a winter home) put out by the Chatham Hotel and Land Company in 1911 to encourage investment in the suburb.
Firstly, prospective buyers had to be white. Purchase of lots by African Americans was prohibited, as was the resale, rental, or gift of any property within the subdivision to any person not of the “white or Caucasian race.”
Stores, merchant properties and apartment buildings could not be built on the lots. Houses, too, had to cost a minimum of between $4000 and $8000, the exact sum dependent upon the location of the lot.
To preserve the park-like appearance of the section, with its undivided lawns surrounding each property, building was confined to an area well within the property line of each lot.
The suburb’s actual parks – Baldwin, Tiedeman, Guckenheimer, Theus, Solomons and McCauly – were laid out by horticulturist Prosper J. Berckmans, who had formerly been employed by the Park and Tree Commission to draw up a plan for Colonial Park. These new small parks were named for current politicians and influential citizens, Savannah’s former policy of only naming its streets and spaces for deceased figures long abandoned.
Baldwin Park honored former Park Commissioner and current owner of the Savannah Electric Company George Baldwin.
Tiedeman Park was named for the then mayor, George Tiedeman. Guckenheimer too was a currently active politician.
Solomons Park and Theus Park were named for current members of the Park and Tree Commission. Its president, Philip Daffin, had already been commemorated by the dedication of nearby Daffin Park in his honor a few years previously.