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Savannah Defines the Gothic City (part one)

11/18/2019

Mickve Israel Synagogue

A while back I gave a lecture at the Flannery O’Connor home about the Gothic nature of Savannah. I will be sharing slightly revised editions of that lecture in the next few historical ruminations blog entries. I hope everyone enjoys.

“What is in a name” is a question asked in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Names are important but the images they bring forth are as equally important. And that is the subject I wish to address today. When one hears the name Charleston we think old south, plantation mansions, and the antebellum period. When one hears the name New Orleans you think of the mixing of cultures that has brought us Jazz, Blues, and Zydeco music. We think of Cajun and Creole cooking. A living experiment of what can happen in multicultural society. But when I say Savannah what do we see? Hostess City, Tree City as our marketing of the city is [unclear] gone. I think not. I propose that when one thinks of Savannah they think knowingly or not about the Southern Gothic world. Certainly, both New Orleans and Savannah have a touch of antebellum in their images but I propose not like Charleston. Savannah and Charleston have a touch of multicultural fever as port cities, Gullah and Geechee cultures, early Jewish settlers but not like New Orleans. Now New Orleans and Charleston have a touch of Southern Gothic but neither is mainly identified with it and I propose Savannah is.
Maybe because Savannah, unlike its neighbor to the North, was not founded by elite island plantation sons and daughters but the poor and middle-class settlers that you find a more Gothic nature and less antebellum emphasis. These were people who knew injustices and were more comfortable with the spirit world. They were the protagonists of the Dickens’ gothic novels of Bleak House and Great Expectations. The stories of success would be of the Horatio Alger’s rags to riches variety in Savannah. Thus, Savannah would need a few generations to have the stories of moral and economic decay. And then the ultimate demise of the Savannah wealthy in the Civil War before its truest Gothic nature might be found.
Savannah was a leader of spreading Gothic architecture in the South and the nation as a whole. So for a brief moment let us look at where and what Gothic architecture is.
Gothic architecture (beginning in @1130 A.D.) is a break from the classical period of the past. The Greek’ and Roman’s dominance of culture was gone. They were with each passing decade more like the Old South a memory of the golden days of antebellum grandeur. In fact, the term Gothic is pejorative and comes from those uneducated, uncivilized, bringers of the Dark Ages people called the Goths. [carpet baggers] The Goths who had sacked Rome. The term was from of course an Italian critic and he so convinced the Italians of its inferior heritage that Gothic Architecture did not make great headway in Italy. What were the offensive trademarks of this new Gothic architecture? Tall buildings reaching upward to the sky with flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings. Light coming from the outside into the interior of the building. With taller buildings came larger stain-glass windows. And instead of corners of darkness and dampness as found in the shorter and squatter classical buildings of the Romans and Greeks you now had beautiful buttressed vaulted ceilings with huge rose windows working as wonderful prisms to the sunlight. And there were also the adornments with even gargoyles to ward off evil. It was a totally different aesthetic. One that spoke of aspirations to reach the heavens or god or the best that humanity could be. This was important as Gothic Architecture comes at the end of the Dark Ages and right before the Enlightenment. It was expressive of Europe’s hope that was beginning to develop after a long period when European humanity had seemed to have lost its way.
For whatever reasons Savannah was a leader, especially in the South, in bringing Gothic Architecture to their city. The Gothic Revival in the US was popular in the post-Civil War years until about the early 1900s. Which seems very déjà vu to its origin in Europe, especially for the south. The colonial/federal plantation style would be the predominant style pre-Civil War. But with the devastating ‘sacking’ of the South, the colonial/ federal especially in Savannah is replaced with an architecture of a new aspirated style of Gothic Revival. A, shall we say, “shining the light in our inner souls” to examine what went wrong and how we might somehow rise from our grotesque nature of slavery and classism and move to higher ground. Yet as in Europe there was a clinging to the long decayed Roman civilization. We call it here in the South the Lost Cause.

Savannah has the first gothic structure in Georgia: St. John’s Episcopal Church. It was built even before the Civil War and the late nineteenth century Gothic revival movement. Alongside of it is the Green Meldrim house which has been called the finest example of residential Gothic Architecture in the South. It was built by John Norris. Norris was also the architect of the second Gothic church dwelling: the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah. Which would become noted as the “Jingle Bells Church” because James Pierpont wrote Jingle Bells while he was the organist at this church.
These two churches were precursors of what was and is the most common church style of architecture in the Historic District. There are over eight churches designed in the Gothic style with another modifying itself to become more Gothic in its nature, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension. The list includes the Congregational Church. Beth Eden Baptist, Wesley Monumental Methodist Church, First Presbyterian Church until it burned and the congregation moved into Neo-Gothic building in Ardsley Park, and most prominent of them all St. John the Baptist Cathedral. The latter, if you catch at the right time of day, cast a literal shadow over Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home. The Cathedral is one of the most prominent buildings in Savannah. But when Flannery as a child walked through Savannah, she would have been engulfed not only by St. John’s Cathedral but also the preponderance of Gothic Architecture here. We also have the only Synagogue in the United States with Gothic Architecture.
To give you an idea of how the architecture look at the picture of the synagogue and First Presbyterian (before it burned)on Monterey Square (see below). Wesley Monumental Methodist Church is right behind the Synagogue and yet another example of Neo Gothic architecture. In the square just east of the Cathedral sits the Unitarian Universalist Church. It should be noted the first major Catholic church built in the southern part of Savannah was the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. And what style was it? Gothic.
What we see is what we think. We know our surroundings influence our moods, attitudes, and stress levels among other things. What we see effects our psychology and spirit. The high aspirations of Gothic Architecture would have been evident in people tired of the old and worn but looking forward to coming through the horrors of the past toward the possibilities of the future. But the darkness of our souls must have light shed on it to achieve our high aspirations. The tall vaulted roofs and large beautiful rose windows would reveal the ruptures in our own souls. It is all this and more that would be earmarks of Savannah’s Gothic rage.
Next blog we will look at the arts and how they further define Savannah as a city that defines Gothic.