Savannah College of Art and Design

This massive institution started as a scrappy family dream back in 1978. Paula Wallace was an elementary school teacher who realized her students had nowhere in the region to continue their artistic pursuits. So, she and her family took a massive leap, selling off their personal belongings to purchase a towering Romanesque Revival red brick building, the Savannah Volunteer Guards Armory. If you check your screen and look at the seventh image, you can see that very flagship building, now called Poetter Hall. They started with just four staff members and seventy one students. Today, the university owns sixty seven historic buildings across the grid of downtown Savannah, meticulously restoring old masonry and ironwork that had been left to decay. But this incredible story of architectural rescue hides a profoundly dark chapter. By the early nineteen nineties, the school was expanding rapidly, yet deep unrest was brewing. In 1991, profound tragedy struck the campus. An architecture professor named Juan Bertotto took his own life in a highly public manner by setting himself on fire. This horrifying event was soon followed by two students jumping to their deaths. The administration responded with intense secrecy, which quickly ignited outrage and paranoia among the students and staff. Frustrated students demanded transparency about where their tuition fees were going and formed their own rebellious newspaper. When a group of faculty members rallied behind the students, SCAD fired twelve of those professors. The campus practically exploded. And I mean that literally. Someone detonated a pipe bomb at the administration building, and two more went off later that year at the Savannah Civic Center, which we walked past way back at the start of our tour. Instead of looking inward, administrators claimed these bombings and protests were a massive corporate conspiracy. They pointed fingers at a rival school, the New York based School of Visual Arts, which had just announced plans to open a branch right here in Savannah. This sparked an all out war. SCAD filed a hundred and three million dollar lawsuit against their rival to protect their reputation. Former SCAD professors even countersued, accusing the college of violating the RICO Act, a complex federal law normally used to prosecute mafia bosses and organized crime syndicates. The legal battle took bizarre local twists, even involving a fired community booster who was locally famous for running around Savannah dressed as Batman. Eventually, the bitter lawsuit was settled right before trial, and the rival school retreated from the city entirely.