Savannah: like a box of chocolates
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Maybe all you need to know about Savannah can be found on a pedicab ride from the Savannah Jazz Festival in Forsyth Park to the Savannah River.
I had the driver — an animation student at the Savannah College of Art and Design — stop at a street artist stand, where Gregory Myrick was selling a surreal print of foodie Paula Deen in front of her Lady & Sons restaurant. I bought the print. Myrick gave me his business card that said, “Artist. Looking for a wife: Interested? Call or write ... Send photo.”
I will spare you the rest of the details.
• The 126-room Mansion on Forsyth Park hotel was built in 2005 next to a 1888 mansion. Nightly rates run from $159 to $389; (888) 711-5114, mansiononforsythpark.com.
CITY MARKET: The entertainment, dining and retail area is in Savannah’s historic district at Jefferson and West St. Julian streets; (912) 232-4903, savannahcitymarket.com.
Much of “Forrest Gump” was shot here. My pedicab went past the site of the famous bench where Forrest sits waiting for a bus, describing his life to anyone who will listen. Sort of like this column. The site is in Chippewa Square, corner of Bull and East Hull streets.
I was in Savannah in late September to catch Mose Allison and the terribly underrated Ben Tucker at the jazz festival.
I stayed two nights at the Bohemian Hotel Savannah Riverfront, which opened in July on the cobblestone streets along the Savannah River. The 75-room, nine-story boutique hotel looks like a restored warehouse. The red brick facade recalls the adjacent riverwalk where cotton trade once dominated.
But the Bohemian is a new building from the Kessler Collection, a chain of upscale hotels I had never heard of.
The hotel has a breathtaking rooftop lounge, where I noticed a series of three boxing paintings that were dead ringers for the work of George Bellows, one of my favorite artists. Bellows’ bold, urban strokes centered around the underbelly of New York City. He satirized the upper class. Bellows was New York writer Joseph Mitchell with a brush. After some research, I learned the boxing paintings were done in Bellows’ style by a South Florida artist.
The hotel was filled with original artwork by the likes of Jean Claude Roy and Gabriela Morawetz. Staying at the Bohemian is like sleeping in the Art Institute of Chicago.
“We started with the artwork in 1995,” said Richard C. Kessler, Chairman and CEO of Kessler Enterprise, Inc., from his office in Orlando, Fla. “When you go to most four-stars, you’re looking at simple prints and things that are boring. I wanted to offer culture.”
When Kessler was 23, he was right hand man to real estate developer Cecil Day and helped found Days Inn of America in 1970. Kessler came up with the sunny Days Inn logo in five minutes.
Kessler said his properties have 5,000 pieces of original art, which he buys himself. Besides the Bohemian and Mansion on Forsyth Park in Savannah, the “Kessler Collection” includes hotels in Colorado, Florida and New Mexico.
“We also have anywhere from one to three artists under contract at any time doing high-end specialty work for our hotels,” said Kessler, 63, a Savannah native.
I wondered about Kessler’s approach. I loved seeing the boxing paintings. But art is so personal, the paintings could turn off someone else.
“I think about the feeling we’re trying to generate at the hotel,” he answered. “The storyline determines the art we put in.”
Art isn’t the only thing Kessler collects. The upscale Mansion on Forsyth Park features a collection of women’s hats in a regal corridor accented by James Muir statues. It took two years to amass the collection of 100 hats and fedoras dating from 1860 to 1960.
“From the turn of the century up to the early 1920s, women’s hats were big in Savannah,” Kessler said. “Even when you go down Bull Street [the oldest street in Georgia] today, there’s several hat shops from the past.”
I have never seen Paula Deen in a hat.
Savannah, the oldest municipality in the state, is a good place for historians to hang their hats. It has one of the largest landmark districts in the United States.
As a fan of urbanist Jane Jacobs’ method of rescuing old buildings, I loved how the 7,000-student Savannah College of Art and Design has remade the downtown by using nearly 70 older buildings as part of the meandering campus.
The City Market dates back to 1755. One of the original three market buildings was torn down after being used as a dressing station during the Siege of Savannah in the Civil War. The market is where I found author Robert “Reds” Helmey, who just opened the corner bookstore Savannah Prose & Poetry. Helmey, 77, is a former Green Beret who was selling his 2000 memoir The Lemon Dance.
“How do I say this humbly?” he asked. “I hijacked a United Airlines plane [from Savannah] to Cuba and Castro accused me of trying to assassinate him.”
Now that’s something you don’t hear on a typical vacation.
Helmey is a fifth-generation Savannahian. I had to ask him why residents are so unusual. Savannah reminded me of Key West, back in the day.
“Savannah is really not in Georgia,” he answered. “It’s in a state of mind. There are a lot of characters here.”
Helmey pulled his plane stunt in 1969 on Super Bowl Sunday. Some have said he was on a covert mission for the CIA. He got off the hook on an insanity defense, resulting from a previous head injury that caused the Special Forces agent to become delusional.
“I handed my pistol to the flight engineer and asked the pilot to radio Havana,” he recalled. “My exact message was, ‘Tell Fidel El Rojo [The Reds] is coming.’ That’s the subtitle of the book.”
Helmey’s deed landed him in a Havana prison for almost a year.
The Lemon Dance is being shopped around for a movie. A screenplay has been dispatched to John Lee Hancock, who wrote the screenplay to “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” the Savannah-based Clint Eastwood film that everyone in town talks about.
Blurbs for The Lemon Dance include testimony from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil author John Berendt who said, “I found this story fascinating!”
Just like any trip to Savannah.
Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored by the Bohemian Hotel Savannah Riverfront.