Rebecca Engel
Savannah was laid out in 1733 around a grid of open squares, and the city still works exactly that way. You walk two blocks, hit a square full of live oaks and Spanish moss, walk two more, hit another one. Twenty two of the original squares are still there, which makes the whole Historic District feel like one big shaded park with a city built through it.
That layout is why the best things to do in Savannah are so easy to string together. Almost everything below sits within a mile of everything else, and the handful that don’t are a short drive out to a cemetery, an oak avenue and a beach. Here are twenty one worth your time.
1. Watch The Fountain At Forsyth Park
Forsyth Park is thirty acres at the south end of the Historic District, and the white cast iron fountain at the top of it is the most photographed thing in the city.
It went in around 1858, back when ordering a fountain out of a catalogue was a thing cities did, and it’s been the centre of Savannah ever since.
The walk up to it under the oaks is the part that gets people. Two rows of trees with Spanish moss hanging down the whole length, which is about as Savannah as it gets.
There’s a farmers market here on Saturday mornings, and the park fills with people the moment the weather turns reasonable.
2. Walk The Length Of Jones Street
Jones Street gets called the most beautiful street in America often enough that it’s basically part of the address now.
It’s a few blocks of brick townhouses with tall stoops, iron railings and oaks meeting overhead, and it looks the same at any hour you turn up.
There’s nothing to do here except walk down it, which is the point. Ten minutes, no ticket, and it’s the street people remember.
It runs east to west between Bull and Whitaker, and it puts you a block from Forsyth at one end.
3. Sit For A While In Chippewa Square
Chippewa Square is where the bus stop scenes in Forrest Gump were filmed, and people still come looking for the bench.
Worth knowing before you make the trip. The bench was a film prop and it lives in the Savannah History Museum now, so there’s nothing to sit on where it stood.
The square is still one of the best of the twenty two, with the bronze statue of James Oglethorpe in the middle of it facing south towards Florida, which was the direction he expected trouble from.
It’s a good one to just sit in for twenty minutes. That’s what the squares are for and hardly anybody actually does it.
4. Wander Colonial Park Cemetery
Colonial Park opened in 1750 and closed to burials in the 1850s, and there are around nine thousand people in it. A lot of them died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1820.
It sits right in the middle of the Historic District with a brick wall around it, and it’s free to walk into during daylight.
One thing to look for. A section of headstones is mounted flat against the back wall rather than standing over graves, because Union troops camped here during the Civil War and moved them. Several have dates that were altered by soldiers, which is why some of the stones claim people lived to a hundred and fifty.
It takes fifteen minutes and it’s one of the quieter corners of the district.
5. Step Inside The Cathedral Basilica Of St John The Baptist
The twin white spires over Lafayette Square belong to the Cathedral Basilica of St John the Baptist, and the inside is far more elaborate than the outside prepares you for.
It’s French Gothic, finished in 1876, then gutted by fire in 1898 and rebuilt. The stained glass, the painted walls and the ceiling are all worth the ten minutes.
It’s free to go in outside of services, and there’s usually somebody at the door who can tell you what you’re looking at.
Lafayette Square outside is a good one to stop in as well, and the Flannery O’Connor childhood home sits on the corner of it.
6. Hear The Story At First African Baptist Church
First African Baptist on Franklin Square traces its congregation back to 1773, which the church says makes it the oldest Black congregation in North America. A church in Virginia makes a similar claim, but either way it’s among the oldest in the country.
The building went up in 1859 and the congregation built it themselves, doing the work at night and on Sundays after finishing the days they were already required to work. Many of them were enslaved at the time.
The floor of the lower level has rows of small holes drilled in a pattern. The church’s account is that they were air holes for people hidden in the crawl space beneath, sheltering there on their way north. Upstairs, some of the pews still carry markings made by the men who built them.
Tours run most days for a small fee and a member of the congregation takes you round. It’s a working church rather than a museum, and it’s the single most worthwhile hour in the Historic District.
7. Tour The Mercer Williams House
The red brick house on Monterey Square was started for Johnny Mercer’s great grandfather, sat unfinished through the Civil War, and was eventually restored by an antiques dealer named Jim Williams.
It’s the house from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the shooting the book is built around happened in the study.
The ground floor is open for tours and it’s genuinely worth doing for the furniture and art alone. The family still lives upstairs, so that part stays shut.
You don’t need to have read the book. It helps, and the book is a good thing to have read before coming to Savannah anyway.
8. See The Ship Models At The Ships Of The Sea Museum
This one is two things at once and the second one is the reason to go.
The museum fills the Scarbrough House, an 1819 mansion built for one of the owners of the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, and it’s full of ship models, figureheads and maritime paintings. The models are detailed enough to hold you longer than you’d expect.
Behind the house is the North Garden, one of the largest private gardens in the Historic District, walled and shaded and almost always empty.
It’s a good rainy afternoon stop, and the garden is a good sunny one.
9. Find The Bird Girl At The Telfair Academy
The Telfair opened in 1886 and claims the title of the oldest public art museum in the South. It’s a mansion turned gallery on Telfair Square, with a good collection of American and European work.
The thing most people come for is the Bird Girl, the statue photographed for the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
She used to stand in Bonaventure Cemetery. So many people went looking for her that the family moved her here to stop the traffic, which is worth knowing before you go hunting through the cemetery for a statue that isn’t there.
One ticket covers the Telfair, the Jepson Center round the corner, and the Owens Thomas House, so it’s decent value if you like a museum.
10. Get A Scoop At Leopold’s Ice Cream
Leopold’s has been going since 1919 and still uses the original recipes, which is the sort of claim every ice cream shop makes and this one can actually back up.
Tutti frutti is the one it’s known for. Honey almond and cream is the one to get.
There’s usually a line down the block on Broughton Street and it moves faster than it looks. The interior is all original fittings from the first shop.
The family connection is a nice detail. One of the Leopolds went off and became a Hollywood producer, which is why there’s film memorabilia on the walls next to the ice cream.
11. Line Up At Mrs Wilkes Dining Room
Mrs Wilkes has been serving southern food family style since the 1940s. You sit at a communal table with strangers, the food comes out in bowls, and you pass it around and eat until you can’t.
Fried chicken, collards, mac and cheese, biscuits, sweet potatoes, and a good ten more dishes on the table at once.
Two things will catch you out. It’s open Monday to Friday from eleven until two and it’s closed all weekend, so a weekend trip misses it entirely. And it’s cash only.
Get there before it opens. The queue forms down Jones Street well ahead of eleven and they stop when the food runs out.
12. Browse Broughton Street
Broughton is the main shopping street and it runs east to west through the middle of the district.
It’s a mix of chains and independents, with a couple of good bookshops, the Savannah Bee Company for mead tasting, and Leopold’s about halfway along.
It’s also where you end up when the heat gets too much, since it’s the one street with a decent run of air conditioned rooms to duck into.
The buildings above the shopfronts are worth looking up at. Most people don’t.
13. Walk Down To River Street And Factors Walk
River Street runs along the Savannah River at the bottom of a bluff, and the cobbles under your feet came over as ballast in ships that arrived empty to load cotton.
The old warehouses along it were the cotton factors’ offices, and the walkways and iron bridges connecting them at the upper levels are Factors Walk. Cotton prices for a good part of the world were set here.
Now it’s bars, sweet shops and souvenir places, and container ships the size of buildings slide past a few metres away, which never stops being strange.
Getting down there is the fun part. There are stone staircases built into the bluff that are steep, uneven and slick when wet, so take the ramp if you’re unsure.
14. Carry A Drink Through The Historic District
Savannah lets you walk around with an open drink, which is rare enough in the States that it surprises most first time visitors.
The rules are specific. It has to be in a plastic cup, sixteen ounces or less, and you have to stay inside the Historic District boundaries. No glass and no cans, and bars will hand you a to go cup if you ask.
It changes how an evening works. You get a drink, walk to a square, sit under the oaks, walk on to the next place, and never have to finish anything in a hurry.
The public intoxication laws still apply as normal, so it’s a to go cup rather than a free for all.
15. Spend An Hour In City Market
City Market is four blocks of open courtyard near Franklin Square, with bars, restaurants and a set of working art studios upstairs.
There’s usually live music outside in the evening and a horse and carriage or two waiting at the edge of it.
It’s the most touristed corner of the district and it’s still good fun, particularly with a to go cup in hand.
Go up to the studios if they’re open. Several of the artists work with the doors open and are happy to talk.
16. Eat At The Grey In The Old Bus Station
The Grey is in a 1938 Greyhound bus terminal on Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, restored with the art deco fittings intact right down to the ticket counter.
The building was segregated when it operated. The restaurant hasn’t hidden that or made a display of it, which is a hard balance and they’ve managed it.
The food is southern with a lot of coastal Georgia in it, and it’s earned a stack of national awards under chef Mashama Bailey.
It’s the priciest thing on this list and it books out well ahead. If you can’t get a table, the bar takes walk ins and the smaller Grey Market café is a few streets away.
17. Spend A Morning In The Starland District
Starland is about twenty minutes south of the squares on foot and it’s where a lot of the city’s newer food and art has ended up.
Murals on most of the walls, a food truck yard, breweries, vintage shops and coffee places, spread over a few blocks of what was a dairy district.
It’s the antidote if the Historic District starts feeling like a film set. Actual neighbourhood, actual people who live there.
Walk down through the Victorian District to get there and you’ll pass some of the best housing stock in the city on the way.
18. Drive Out To Bonaventure Cemetery
Bonaventure sits on a bluff over the Wilmington River about fifteen minutes east of the city, on the grounds of a former plantation.
It’s a hundred acres of live oaks, Spanish moss and Victorian statuary, and it is genuinely one of the most beautiful places in Georgia. Johnny Mercer is buried here, and so is Conrad Aiken, whose grave is a stone bench you’re meant to sit on.
Go in the late afternoon. The light comes in sideways through the moss and the whole place turns the colour of weak tea.
It’s free and open during daylight hours. The Bird Girl statue is not here any more, so don’t spend an hour looking for her.
19. Walk The Oak Avenue At Wormsloe
The avenue at Wormsloe is the picture you’ve seen of Savannah whether you knew it or not. Four hundred live oaks in two rows running a mile and a half straight ahead, with the moss almost meeting in the middle.
It’s on the Isle of Hope, about twenty minutes out, and it was the estate of Noble Jones, one of the colonists who arrived with Oglethorpe in 1733.
Past the avenue there’s a trail down to the tabby ruins of his fortified house, which is the oldest standing structure in Savannah. Tabby is a building material made from oyster shells, lime and sand, and there’s a lot of it on this coast.
There’s a small state park fee. Go early if you want the avenue without cars in the shot, because it’s a working road into the site.
20. Take A Day At Tybee Island
Tybee is eighteen miles east and it’s where Savannah goes to the beach. Wide flat sand, a pier, and a small strip of seafood places and beach bars behind it.
The lighthouse is the thing to climb. There’s been one on this spot since 1736 and the current tower gets you a hundred and seventy odd steps up for a view over the whole island and the mouth of the river.
The north end near the lighthouse is quieter and better for shells. The south end by the pier is where everything is happening.
Autumn is the sweet spot out here. The water is still warm into October and the summer crowds have gone home.
21. Cross The Marsh To Fort Pulaski
Fort Pulaski is on Cockspur Island on the way out to Tybee, so the two go together in one day easily.
It’s a moated brick fort that took eighteen years to build and was considered impossible to take. In 1862 Union forces with new rifled cannon breached the wall in about thirty hours, and every masonry fort in the world was obsolete by the end of that week.
You can still see the holes. The southeast wall was patched with newer brick and the repair is obvious from the outside.
The marsh walk around the fort is worth doing too, and there’s a good chance of seeing dolphins in the channel from the dike trail.
More Things To Do In Savannah Georgia
A few more that didn’t make the numbered list but are worth knowing about.
The Pin Point Heritage Museum sits in an old oyster factory south of the city and tells the story of the Gullah Geechee community that worked it, which is a piece of coastal Georgia most visitors never hear about. Skidaway Island State Park nearby has boardwalk trails out over the marsh.
The American Prohibition Museum in City Market is better than it sounds and ends in a working speakeasy bar. Old Fort Jackson on the river fires a cannon most afternoons in season.
And yes, the ghost tours. Savannah has more of them than any city needs and they range from properly researched history to somebody in a cape. If you want one, ask your hotel which company is currently good, because the answer changes.
Best Time To Visit Savannah
Autumn and spring, and it isn’t close. October and November give you warm days, cool evenings and no humidity worth mentioning. Late March and April bring the azaleas out across the squares, which is the prettiest the city gets.
Summer is hard work. July and August sit in the nineties with humidity to match, and the walking that makes this city good becomes something you do between air conditioned rooms.
Winter is mild and quiet and much cheaper, and the oaks keep their leaves, so it never looks bare the way a northern city does.
One date to plan around either way. Savannah’s St Patrick’s Day celebration is one of the largest in the country and turns the whole Historic District into a several hundred thousand person party. Book months ahead or avoid mid March entirely.
Getting Around Savannah
The Historic District is about a mile square and walking it is the whole point, so base yourself inside it if you can and leave the car parked.
There’s a free shuttle that loops the district and it’s genuinely useful when the heat gets going or your feet give out.
You will want a car or a rideshare for four things on this list. Bonaventure, Wormsloe, Tybee and Fort Pulaski are all fifteen to thirty minutes out and there’s no practical bus.
Watch the paving. The squares and the older streets are brick and cobble, they’re uneven, and River Street’s stairs down the bluff are steeper than they look. Comfortable shoes matter more here than in most cities.
Final Thoughts
The best things to do in Savannah aren’t really the attractions. They’re the squares between them, and the fact that you can’t cross this city without walking through five of them.
Give yourself two full days in the Historic District and one for the drive out to Bonaventure, Wormsloe and the coast. That’s the shape of a good trip here.
Book Mrs Wilkes into a weekday, get a to go cup, and don’t plan the afternoons too tightly.
