The Historic Squares

Savannah's squares are the city's masterpiece and its operating system: General James Oglethorpe laid the 1733 colony out as a repeating grid of wards, each centered on a public square, and twenty-two of the original pattern survive — a two-mile walking museum of live oaks and Spanish moss, fountains and monuments, framed by the townhouse and mansion rows the plan was designed to dignify. Each square keeps its own character, and learning them is the visit: Chippewa holds the Forrest Gump bench site (the bench itself lives in the history museum) and the Savannah Theatre; Madison frames the Sorrel-Weed House's haunted bulk; Lafayette pairs the cathedral's spires with the Andrew Low House and flannery O'Connor's childhood home; Monterey poses its Pulaski monument against Forsyth's approach; Reynolds seats the Olde Pink House's pink stucco; Johnson — the first and largest — anchors the business end; and Wright, Oglethorpe, Orleans, and the rest fill the grid between with their own monuments, duels, and dedications. The craft is simple: walk Bull Street's spine from City Hall to Forsyth Park — it threads five of the best squares in a mile — detour by whim, and let the district's rhythm (shade, bench, mansion, repeat) set the pace. Free always, gorgeous in every season, at their best in early morning light and lamplit evening — and the explanation for everything else in this guide, which is arranged, like the city, around them.

The plan deserves its fame: Oglethorpe's ward system — a square of about an acre, flanked east and west by "trust lots" for public buildings and churches, north and south by "tything lots" for houses — repeated as the colony grew, producing by the 1850s a grid of 24 squares (22 survive; two fell to progress and one, Ellis, was resurrected from a parking garage in 2010, which tells you where the city's heart is). Urban historians rank it among the world's great town plans — the squares calm traffic, shade the walk, and parcel the district into digestible rooms — and the 1966 designation of the Savannah Historic District as one of the country's largest National Historic Landmark districts fixed it in law after the mid-century preservation fights (the Historic Savannah Foundation's rescue of the Davenport House in 1955, this guide's museum entry, is the origin story).

A connoisseur's sampler for the walk: Johnson Square (1733, the first — Nathanael Greene's obelisk and the banking row); Wright Square (the colony's second — Tomochichi's boulder, the Yamacraw chief who made the colony possible, and the gilded Gordon monument); Chippewa (Gump's bus-stop scenes filmed on its north side; the theatre's neon); Madison (the Sorrel-Weed's green shutters and the Green-Meldrim House where Sherman wrote the Christmas telegram offering Lincoln the city); Lafayette (cathedral spires, the Hamilton-Turner Inn's French Empire wedding cake, O'Connor's stoop); Monterey (Pulaski's monument over the district's most photographed oak canopy); and Reynolds (the Olde Pink House and Oliver Sturges House holding the colonial corner). Mercer-Williams House on Monterey — the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil house — tours its parlors for the book's pilgrims.

Working the district: the squares run roughly north-south over a mile and a half — Bull Street is the ceremonial spine and the correct first walk, River Street and Forsyth the bookends — with benches, fountains, and oak shade metering the summer heat. Mornings before nine belong to dog walkers, photographers, and the light through the moss; evenings bring lamplit strolling and the ghost tours mustering on the darker corners. To-go cups (the district's famous open-container allowance, within the marked zone, plastic only) make the golden-hour square crawl a licensed local custom. The squares are free, unticketed, and uncloseable — the one attraction no itinerary can skip because the city is physically made of it. Pair with the trolley for the narrated version, the house museums for the interiors, and this guide's walking itinerary for the square-by-square route.