Visitors’ love for historic Savannah is flattering and lucrative — but the pains of living in a heavily touristed city are coming up again on the agenda at downtown’s largest residential organization.
The Savannah Downtown Neighborhood Association is taking up questions of balancing tourism and quality of life at its Feb. 18 meeting. Some say they feel like residents of Paris or Venice: overtouristed.
Ahead of this meeting, The Current mapped some information about tourism and residents, starting with the city’s 90-day pilot project restricting walking tours that started Feb. 1.
About 60 companies have city licenses to conduct visitors around on foot, on segways, buses and other vehicles.
But Savannah’s new pilot project draws a late-night line on the pedestrians along Liberty and Lincoln streets. South of Liberty, pedestrian tours have to wrap up by 10 p.m. North of that, east of Lincoln, tours must stop by midnight.
Those two lines come close to capturing Savannah’s zoning boundaries, too: east of Lincoln and south of Liberty, most blocks are zoned residential. During the day, commercial activity is allowed and trolley tours alone drop hundreds of people on busy days. Some residents tell the neighborhood association they are tired of hearing loud guides through historically accurate single-pane windows and elbowing through rowdy tourists clogging up the narrow sidewalks.
If there’s a symbol of the tension, it’s Colonial Park Cemetery. On two sides, the park is bounded by the last few streets of homes in the residential area. It’s OK to start a late tour on one side of the cemetery but not on the other. And it’s a draw for ghost-hunters, who are liable to be out at night and shining lights into places. In a list of the city’s most haunted places, Visit Savannah itself promotes several sites nearby.
Check out our map to get the landscape before you head out to the DNA meeting.
