Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

  “I was having breakfast one morning,” he said. “It was December of 1959. I read in the newspaper that a row of four townhouses on Oglethorpe Avenue was about to be torn down. They were lovely. Built in 1855. They were known as the Mary Marshall Row. It was the same old story: A local wrecker had bought the houses in order to knock them down and sell the bricks. The bricks! You see, they’re Savannah gray bricks, which are larger and more porous than ordinary bricks, and they have a very soft and beautiful color. They were kilned at the Hermitage Plantation on the Savannah River. They’re not made anymore, and you can’t duplicate them. They were selling for ten cents each at the time, more than three times the cost of an ordinary brick. Anyhow, the wrecker had already demolished the carriage houses, and the townhouses themselves would be gone in a matter of days.”

  Adler pulled over to the curb on Oglethorpe Avenue in front of Colonial Cemetery. Across the street stood a handsome row of four brick townhouses, each with a stoop of white marble steps leading up to the main entrance on the second floor. The bricks were a muted, grayish red. “There they are,” he said, “fully restored. When I came to look at them that day, the windows were out, the doors were gone, and the steps were in bad shape. The bricks from the carriage houses were piled up in the backyard. I went into one of the houses and climbed up to the third floor and looked out at the magnificent view. And I thought, ‘This can’t be allowed to happen.’”

  Adler paid a call on old Mr. Monroe, the wrecker, and told him he wanted to buy the whole row. Mr. Monroe told him he could get the bricks to him in six weeks. “I don’t want you to touch those bricks!” Adler replied. “I want you to leave them right where they are.” Mr. Monroe agreed, but said Adler would have to buy the land too; he could have the whole row, bricks and land, for $54,000. So Adler and three other men signed a note for it. Then they wrote a prospectus and took it to Historic Savannah Foundation, which had three hundred members at the time, proposing that the foundation buy the row—at a cost of $180 a member. “My idea,” said Adler, “was that the foundation would resell the houses to people who would agree to restore them. Historic Savannah went along with it.” That was the beginning of the revolving fund.

  It happened that the poet Conrad Aiken had lived as a child in the house right next to Marshall Row—at number 228, the house in which Aiken’s father had shot his mother and then himself on that terrible morning in February 1901. Having spent most of his life up north, Aiken wanted to come back and live his last years in Savannah. So a millionaire friend, a man named Hy Sobiloff, bought and restored the house on the end of Marshall Row for Aiken and his wife, Mary. It was number 230, the house next door to the one Aiken had lived in as a boy.

  “When work was completed on the house,” said Adler, “the contrast between it and the other three was startling. I went to the phone and called the newspaper and said, ‘Do you want to see a miracle? Come on!’ So they came over, and they did a big feature on it in their Sunday edition. That was in February 1962. We had an open house the day the story appeared. It rained, but something like seven thousand people came through the house. They wore the shellac off the banister. We let them go into the unrestored house next door, too, for a before-and-after comparison. And they saw for the first time how a dilapidated wreck could be transformed into something marvelous. When that happened, we started to get some interest. People began to see the potential. They began to think about moving back downtown. Of course, it didn’t hurt one bit that Savannah’s greatest man of letters, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was leading the way.”

  We resumed our drive. Adler pointed out dozens of houses that had been saved, describing in detail their once-fallen condition. “The porch on that one was completely gone …that house had bright green asbestos siding and aluminum awnings … the roof on that one was rotted through ….” He was like a doctor reviewing the case histories of former patients, now fully recovered.

  Adler’s success with Marshall Row encouraged him to go out and raise money for a revolving fund to be used by Historic Savannah to save other houses in the same way. The concept was very simple: Historic Savannah would use the money to buy endangered houses, then resell them—at a loss, if necessary—to people who would sign a pledge to begin restoration within eighteen months. The foundation set a goal of $200,000 for the fund, enough money in those days to save a lot of houses if they were turned over quickly enough. And they were.

  “But even with the revolving fund, it was a struggle,” said Adler. “I’d come downtown every day and breathe in the air and plot out the day’s fight. And it was indeed a fight, because the buildings were still coming down pretty fast. Sometimes we won. Sometimes we lost. And the voters of Savannah gave us no help at all. They rejected urban renewal three times because they thought it was a communist plot, and they defeated any number of proposals for historic-zoning ordinances. That monstrosity over there, for instance, was one of our biggest losses. The Hyatt Regency Hotel.”

  We were riding along Bay Street, passing in front of the Hyatt—a squat, modernist building next to City Hall. The Hyatt had been a great cause célèbre in Savannah. The building had taken a great chunk out of the row of nineteenth-century cotton warehouses along Factors’ Walk, and its backside jutted out over River Street, interrupting the line of façades along the riverfront. The public battle over the hotel delayed its construction for ten years.

  “You can see the hotel is all wrong for the site,” said Adler. “We fought it in the courts, and let me tell you it was a bruising battle. Both of the developers were members of Historic Savannah Foundation. The sister of one of them was the acting director. The organization was split right down the middle. Practically destroyed. It was a very emotional time. I remember going to a wedding while all that was happening, and when I walked in I realized I was suing everybody in the room but the bride and the minister.”

  At about that time, restoration of the historic district was nearing completion. Over a thousand houses had been restored. The work had been done by affluent whites, but Adler insisted that blacks had not been displaced. Historic Savannah was buying empty buildings for the most part. But when the supply of unrestored houses in the historic district began to dwindle, the next logical step was to restore the houses in the neighboring Victorian district. And that would have been a different story.

  We drove south on Abercorn Street. Within a few blocks, the restrained architecture of the historic district gave way to late-Victorian flights of fancy—big old wooden houses with romantic towers, gables, and elaborate gingerbread trim. A few were restored, but most were in very poor condition.

  The Victorian district was Savannah’s first streetcar suburb. It had been built for the white working class between 1870 and 1910. After World War II, when the whites moved farther out into the suburbs, absentee landlords took over, and by 1975 the area had become a black slum. The houses were in deplorable shape, but they were still beautiful, and in recent years speculators and upper-income whites started buying them. At that point, Adler became alarmed. “It would have meant gentrification and massive displacement of blacks,” he said, “and I was determined to prevent that. I asked Historic Savannah to help find a way to restore this area without evicting the people who lived here, but Historic Savannah was still busted up over the Hyatt, and they weren’t interested in the housing problems of poor people. That’s when I quit Historic Savannah. I launched a nonprofit organization called the Savannah Landmark Rehabilitation Project, which has been a triumph, because the board includes everybody—black, white, you name it, rich and poor.”

  Adler’s intention was to get houses out of the hands of the absentee slumlords and convert the Victorian district into a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. It occurred to him that the project might qualify for public assistance, and thus far, by using a combination of public and private funding, he had bought and renovated three hundred units. Tenants paid 30 percent of their income in rent, and the rest was made up by federa
l rent subsidies.

  “I don’t suppose I need to tell you,” Adler said, “that not everyone is happy about what we’re doing here. Some people complain privately about poor blacks living in subsidized housing so close to the historic district. A few people, like Jim Williams, have even spoken out publicly about it. Jim Williams says we’re dealing with the ‘criminal element.’ I take it you’ve heard of Jim Williams.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve met him.”

  “Mmmmm. Do you know about the Nazi flag incident?”

  “He told me about it,” I said. “He said he draped it over his balcony to interrupt a film being shot in Monterey Square.”

  “That’s right,” said Adler. “He had all those little faggots hanging the swastika out there and moving it from window to window.”

  On Anderson Street, Adler stopped in front of a freshly painted gray-and-white house. “Now I’m going to introduce you to an example of our so-called criminal element.”

  We climbed the steps, and Adler rang the bell. A black woman in a flowered housedress came to the door.

  “Morning, Ruby,” said Adler.

  “Morning, Mr. Adler,” she said. Adler introduced me to Mrs. Ruby Moore.

  “Ruby, I’ve brought this gentleman to see what life is like in the Victorian district. If you don’t mind—”

  “Oh, that’ll be fine,” she said pleasantly. “Come on in.”

  Ruby Moore’s duplex was cool inside. It had three bedrooms, a modern kitchen, and high ceilings. There was a small garden in back. A portrait of John F. Kennedy hung over the living-room mantel. Adler led me on a quick tour, upstairs and down. Then we rejoined Mrs. Moore in the front hall.

  “These houses was pitiful before they was fixed over,” she said. “I never dreamed they would look like this after they got through. While they was redoing them, I was over here every day looking, ’Cause I knew I was going to get one. I really do appreciate my apartment. I really do. It’s got central heat and air.”

  “Is everything okay, Ruby?” Adler asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Would you sign my book, please?” A guest book lay open on a table in the living room. As I signed my name, I noticed that I was not the first outsider to be brought to this house by Lee Adler. A reporter from the Atlanta Constitution had signed a few spaces above.

  We got back in the car. Adler told me that Ruby Moore qualified for one of his apartments because she was a longtime resident of the Victorian district, because she worked—she was a housekeeper at the Days Inn—and because her income was below a specified level. She paid $250 a month in rent, and federal subsidies covered the rest. Adler said that Mrs. Moore more than satisfied his inspection staff; her house was always immaculate, and she was the rule rather than the exception. “We’re not interested in housing the whores or the gamblers or the dope dealers,” he said.

  We headed back into the historic district.

  “I could show you another hundred apartments just like that one, but you probably get the picture. Once we got it going, private investors started buying houses, and property values began to rise. The Victorian district has been acclaimed as a national model for how to restore inner cities without uprooting the poor. We sponsored a national housing conference here in 1977, and four hundred people came from thirty-eight states. The next year, Rosalynn Carter came down and taped a segment of Good Morning America in one of our renovated apartments. And this Friday we’re going to Washington to explain it all to Prince Charles.”

  We entered Monterey Square and swung around it counterclockwise, coming to a stop in front of Adler’s house. “Well, there you have it,” he said. “Historic preservation used to be an elitist hobby, something rich dilettantes dabbled in. But we’ve turned it into a grass-roots operation. In the process we created a $200 million tourist industry and brought people back downtown to live. Not bad, huh?”

  “Quite an accomplishment,” I said.

  Adler looked at me over the top of his half-moon glasses. “It ain’t braggin’ if y’really done it.”

  A week later, the Savannah Morning News published an account of the Adlers’ meeting with Prince Charles. Lee Adler was quoted saying that the prince “showed a keen interest in the problems of cities.” Emma Adler said the prince had asked “marvelously intelligent, wonderful and apt questions.” Four days later, the newspaper ran yet another article about the meeting, this one a first-person account written by Mrs. Adler. “It was a heavenly day in Washington,” she wrote. “The sun was bright, the sky a deep blue. The weather was perfect for a suit ….”

  Once again, the Adlers were the topic of conversation in certain circles. The talk was nowhere more animated than at the meeting of the Married Woman’s Card Club on Tuesday night.

  “Do you suppose,” said a woman in a blue taffeta dress, “that the newspaper had to twist Emma’s arm to get her to write that article? Or do you think Emma twisted the newspaper’s arm to make them print it?” The woman’s dress had a bow across the shoulders as big as wings.

  “Julia, you’re wicked,” said a woman wearing a black velvet headband and single-pearl earrings.

  “No, I’m not,” the woman in blue replied. “The Adlers could have kept their audience with Prince Charles a private matter if they’d wanted to. But they’ve gone running to the newspaper as usual, and that changes things.”

  “True.”

  “I mean, Emma could have restrained herself a little, don’t you think? She sounded so prissy and pleased with herself.”

  “Now, Julia,” said the other woman, her voice dropping in volume, “I do believe you’re jealous.”

  The two ladies had not yet begun to play cards. In fact, they were still standing outside Cynthia Collins’s front door, waiting to be admitted. That was one of the unusual rituals of the Married Woman’s Card Club.

  Married Woman’s (as it was known for short) was one of Savannah’s most exclusive societies. No other city had anything like it. It was founded in 1893 by sixteen ladies in search of amusement during the day while their husbands were at work. There were always sixteen members—no more, no less. Once a month, always on a Tuesday, they would gather at one of the members’ homes for two hours of card playing, cocktails, and a light supper. Thirty-two guests would be invited by engraved invitation so that the number of ladies in attendance always came to forty-eight—twelve card tables in all.

  According to custom, the ladies would arrive a few minutes before four in the afternoon, wearing white gloves, long dresses, and huge hats adorned with flowers or feathers. They did not ring the doorbell. Instead, they waited outside, either in their cars or on the sidewalk, until the hostess opened the door punctually at four o’clock. The ladies would then enter, sit down at the card tables, and start playing at once. In the early years, they played whist or euchre or 500. Later the game became auction bridge, then contract bridge. But for many years there was always one table of whist, because Mrs. J. J. Rauers refused to learn how to play anything else.

  Once the ladies had begun playing, events proceeded according to a strict schedule that began with the serving of a glass of water. Every member was given a printed copy of the schedule upon joining Married Woman’s. It read as follows:

  Four-fifteen: water.

  Four-thirty: remove water.

  Four-forty: empty ashtrays.

  Four fifty-five: pass napkins.

  Five o’clock: cocktails.

  Five-fifteen: second cocktail.

  Five-thirty: third cocktail.

  Five thirty-five: last hand, pass linen.

  Five-forty: serve dinner plates.

  Five forty-five: high score and cut for aces.

  Six o’clock: prizes, ladies leave promptly.

  Being the hostess at one of these affairs was a serious matter. It was viewed as reason enough to paint the house or redecorate the parlor. At the very least, one took the silver out of the vault. As for keeping to the printed schedule, there was always
a cadre of maids who knew the sequence of events better than the members did, and they would be loaned to nervous hostesses in order to ease their burden. The importance of the schedule was that it enabled the married women to get home in time to greet their husbands when they returned from work. Husbands were as much a part of Married Woman’s as their wives. They were, after all, the ones who footed the bill for the dinners and for refurbishing the house beforehand. And they were, of course, the major qualification for membership: A woman had to be married to belong. The rules stated that if a member obtained a divorce, she would be forced to resign and forfeit her dues. More than one marriage had been held together by that rule alone. In any case, three times a year the hour for Married Woman’s was moved from four to seven-thirty so that the all-important husbands could attend. The men would wear black tie.

  On the Tuesday following the Adlers’ return from Washington, husbands were invited to Married Woman’s. Mrs. Cameron Collins was the hostess for the evening. She and her husband lived with their three children in a townhouse on Oglethorpe Avenue. Men in black tie and women in long dresses began milling around in front of the house shortly before seven-thirty. I, too, had put on a black tie that evening, having been invited by Mrs. Collins.

  “I am not jealous of Emma Adler,” said the woman in blue. “Not at all. I’d be the first to admit that Emma does a great many worthwhile things. She is an asset to the community, and if anybody deserves to meet Prince Charles, she does. It’s just this … this grasping for recognition. It’s so undignified. They always do it. You’d think Lee restored Savannah single-handedly. Lee loves basking in the limelight, and so does Emma.” The woman turned to a man with thinning blond hair, who was leaning casually against a tree with his hands in his pockets. “Darling,” she said, “do you think I’m being unfair?”

  The man shrugged. “If you ask me, Emma Adler is a vast improvement over her mother.”