Businesses are primarily posted along the main thoroughfares, including Bull, Habersham, 37th and Victory streets. Slow but steady But Thomas Square is home to more than homes. Contractors are as common now as residents sipping sweet tea on their porches once were. Today, scaffolding sprouts like metal flowers beside the old homes and buildings. With them slowly came a new urban concept: gentrification. Upper- and middle-class families who had once fled now returned to the city’s older, urban neighborhoods. But by the late 1950s, renovation of downtown properties sparked urban renewal across Savannah. Others were simply abandoned.įor a time, Thomas Square attracted no one at all. Occupied homes and buildings fell into disrepair. As a consequence, the old neighborhood suffered. In the 1930s and ’40s, the same suburban expansion that founded Thomas Square abandoned the neighborhood to pursue new modernism farther south. Savannah’s growing middle and upper classes needed more space and bigger homes and headed south to Thomas Square.īut progress keeps moving. Between 18, development in Thomas Square hit its period of greatest growth. In 1888, streetcars began running to the area and with them, eventually, electricity for homes. That move formed the north and south borders of Thomas Square. In 1883, the city limits were extended south from Anderson to 42nd Street and Estill Avenue, now Victory Drive. The Georgia Infirmary served the medical needs of former slaves. Railroad workers built the Savannah and Albany line. In 1875, much of the land east of Bull Street and south of Anderson was laid out in farm lots and sparsely developed, according to records from the Historic Savannah Foundation.
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