Savannah audiotours

James Oglethorpe founded Savannah in 1733 as the first planned city in the American colonies, laying it out on a grid of wards, each centered on a public square. Twenty-two of those squares still exist, shaded by live oaks draped in Spanish moss, and walking between them through Forsyth Park and Chippewa Square and Wright Square feels less like sightseeing than like moving through a city that understood itself completely from the beginning. The Bull Street corridor from City Hall south to Forsyth Park is one of the finest urban promenades in the country.

The Savannah College of Art and Design arrived in 1978 and took on the task of restoring the city's abandoned buildings, converting old cotton warehouses, churches, and commercial blocks into studios and galleries.

SCAD now enrolls about 15,000 students and has reshaped the city's economy and character. The result is a place where antebellum mansions on Monterey Square coexist with experimental art installations, and where a city that spent decades in genteel decay became one of the most livable and visited in the South.