Where Art, History & Squares Are Inseparable

Savannah, Georgia · Culture & History

Where Art, History & the Squares Are Inseparable

A walker's guide to Savannah's living canvas — twenty-two squares, three centuries of stories, and a creative spirit that never sleeps.

Historic District · Wandering Guide · 10 min read

Savannah doesn't ask you to choose between history and beauty. Here, every mossy courtyard is a painting, every bronze monument a story mid-sentence, and every cobblestone square an invitation to slow down and look — really look — at one of America's most visually extraordinary cities.

There is a particular quality of light in Savannah in the late afternoon. It falls through the live oaks at a low angle, turns the Spanish moss to silver, and settles over the squares like something borrowed from a Dutch master's canvas. Photographers know this light. Painters have been chasing it for centuries. And visitors who arrive with no agenda at all stumble into it accidentally — and find themselves unable to leave.

That's the spell Savannah casts. It happens at the intersection of art, history, and the simple act of wandering. And it happens, most reliably, in the squares.

The Squares: America's Greatest Urban Canvas

General James Oglethorpe laid out Savannah's grid in 1733 with a design radical for its time: a city built around a series of open public squares, each functioning as a neighborhood anchor, a gathering place, a green lung in the heart of a planned city. Twenty-two of the original twenty-four squares survive today, and together they form what many urban planners consider the finest walkable city plan in North America.

“The squares are not decorations. They are the grammar of the city — the pauses between clauses that make the whole sentence worth reading.”

— on Oglethorpe’s 1733 city plan

But Oglethorpe's genius wasn't only spatial. He left each square to accumulate meaning over time — monuments, fountains, benches, gardens — so that today each one reads like a distinct chapter of a very long book. To walk the squares in sequence is to move through three hundred years of American history without ever setting foot in a museum.

Chippewa Square

Home to a bronze Daniel Chester French statue of Oglethorpe himself, Chippewa is also the square where the bench scenes from Forrest Gump were filmed — a cultural palimpsest where colonial history and cinematic mythology occupy the same patch of ground.

Forsyth Park & the Great Fountain

Not technically a square, but the city's grandest public space — anchored by its famous white cast-iron fountain, dating to 1858. On any given morning: painters with easels, musicians tuning up, tourists making the mandatory photograph.

Madison Square

A quieter square, shaded and intimate, presided over by a memorial to Sergeant William Jasper — a Revolutionary War hero who fell in the Siege of Savannah in 1779. Across stands the Green-Meldrim House, where Sherman wrote his famous telegram to Lincoln after capturing Savannah in 1864.

Art in the City: Where the Creative Life Pulses

Savannah's art scene is inseparable from its architecture. The same buildings that served as cotton warehouses in the nineteenth century now house galleries, studios, and the classrooms of SCAD — the Savannah College of Art and Design — one of the largest and most influential art universities in the country. SCAD didn't just bring students to Savannah; it brought a metabolism, a constant influx of creativity that has transformed the Historic District into one of the most genuinely artistic urban environments in the American South.

GALLERY DISTRICT

SCAD Museum of Art

Housed in a stunning adaptive reuse of a historic railroad depot, with a permanent collection spanning African art, photography, and contemporary work.

TELFAIR MUSEUMS

Jepson Center

The Moshe Safdie-designed Jepson is the modern anchor of Savannah's oldest public art museum — bold glass-and-stone making its own architectural argument.

HISTORIC COLLECTION

Telfair Academy

The original Telfair mansion, now a museum, houses American Impressionist work, the Bird Girl sculpture, and rooms that feel like the nineteenth century.

LIVING COMMUNITY

City Market Studios

Working artists' studios where you can watch painters, jewelers, and sculptors mid-process — and take something genuinely made in Savannah home.

What distinguishes Savannah's art scene is its permeability. The art escapes its containers. Murals climb buildings in the Victorian District. Sculpture appears mid-sidewalk on Broughton Street. The city itself is the gallery — the squares its most visited rooms.

History That Refuses to Be Still

Savannah is the oldest city in Georgia and one of the most historically intact urban environments in the United States. Sherman's decision not to burn it in 1864 preserved not just the architecture but the spatial DNA of a city that had grown continuously since the colonial era.

But history in Savannah has always been contested territory. The Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, the First African Baptist Church — the oldest Black Baptist congregation in North America — and Colonial Park Cemetery all bear witness to a more complete accounting of what this city was and is.

“The architecture beautiful and the history uncomfortable often share the same address in Savannah. That tension is not a flaw in the city’s character. It is its character.”

— on Savannah’s layered past

How to Wander the Squares Like a Savannahan

A loose itinerary for the unhurried

I Begin at Johnson Square — the oldest, largest, and most ceremonial. Let the oaks orient you. Then simply pick a direction.

II Walk Bull Street north to south: it threads through five squares — Johnson, Wright, Chippewa, Madison, and Monterey — each a different mood and century.

III Detour into the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Lafayette Square. Soaring vaulted ceilings, painted windows, the particular silence of a very large stone building on a warm afternoon.

IV End at Forsyth Park. Sit near the fountain, watch the light change. Stay longer than you planned. That's the whole point.

V Pick up a gallery map at the Telfair and add one exhibition. The best Savannah days are equal parts outdoors and indoors, square and studio.

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Why You Remember Savannah

Other cities have better museums. Other cities have more famous art. But very few cities have managed to make the experience of walking their streets feel like moving through a living work of art — where every corner turn produces something beautiful or strange or old or unexpected.

Savannah does this because it was designed to be walked and lingered in. Because art happened to take root in a city already saturated with history, and the two have been feeding each other ever since.

Come for one of the twenty-two squares. Stay for all of them. And somewhere along the way — on a particular afternoon, in a particular slant of oak-filtered light — you'll understand why people who visit Savannah tend to come back, and eventually tend to stay.

Stay in the middle of the story.

Lucky Savannah's historic properties place you inside the Historic District — walking distance from the squares, the galleries, and three hundred years of the city's most extraordinary architecture.

EXPLORE LUCKY SAVANNAH'S HISTORIC PROPERTIES →