UO > Community Profile > Savannah, GA

That’s the come-on you’ll find on the Web site of the Savannah Film Commission, which has helped make this lush southern Georgia setting a Valhalla for some 40 Hollywood production crews, with more to come.

Forrest Gump (a.k.a. Tom Hanks) sat on a park bench on Chippewa Square, and Jim Williams (a.k.a. Kevin Spacey) held forth at the Mercer House on Monterey Square. That’s where Warner Brothers filmed “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” John Berendt’s quasi-novel about quirky locals, violence, and voodoo, now known by all Savannahians as simply “The Book.”

This is The Book’s 10th anniversary year, and tourism officials expect yet another onslaught of visitors looking for all the related sites. In fact, movie sites are the sole subject for one tour company. Others do movie and literary tours. But Savannah’s many exquisite restored homes, some older than 200 years, are still the most popular tourist sites.

“Sometimes the streets in the Historic District are so crowded with tourists that it’s hard to get around them,” says Jean Soderlind, operator of Ghost Talk, Ghost Walk, the original of 27 current spook quests in a city where apparitions add a surreal dimension and are almost a part of everyday life. No one can say why so many dead Savannahians choose to hang around, but Soderlind has a theory: “Savannah is such a beautiful city,” she says, “if you were a ghost you’d want to stay here, too!”

Climate and historic charm are attracting more than ghosts now. Today’s newcomers include more and more high-level research physicians and academics, lured by top-notch new facilities at both of the city’s hospital campuses.

If there are crowds of visitors, too, bring ‘em on, says Mark A. Taylor, MD, who couldn’t be happier about living in a popular tourist destination, since some of the faces in those crowds might be his visiting friends. “I’ve never lived in a town where people are happy to see me and want to go there,” says Taylor. What’s more, “Because Savannah is tourist-oriented, it has more to offer than equivalent-sized towns.” Attractions include a quality arts scene spearheaded by the world-renowned Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and a large variety of good restaurants.

Besides its powerful arts presence, SCAD, founded in 1978, has played a major role in historic district restoration. Instead of locating on a new campus somewhere in a suburb, the founders restored the old Savannah Volunteer Guard Armory as its flagship building. Today its 6,200 students are from 50 states and nearly 80 countries, and it occupies 50 historic buildings in and near the 2.2-square-mile district where James Edward Oglethorpe and his band of 114 English settlers broke ground in February 1733.

The last of the 13 original colonies, Georgia, unlike the others, began as a commercial enterprise where everyone would be welcome—except Catholics, slaves, and lawyers. The 21 sponsoring “trustees” back in England were also wary of Jews.

The plan was for a silk-producing empire to end import dependence, as historian Preston Russell puts it, on “its eternal enemy, France.” The colony would also thwart northward Spanish expansion from Florida.

Anti-semitism melted when in July, 1733, Dr. Samuel Nunez came ashore with a group of 42 storm-tossed Portuguese Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition. He was a welcome replacement for William Cox, the sole physician with the British group, who, ironically, had been the first of 50 settlers who died in those first six months. Setting the tone for an open-minded society, Nunez and his compatriots established America’s third oldest Jewish congregation. Its synagogue is now a stalwart landmark on Monterey Square.

Descendants of at least two of those first Jewish families still live in Savannah. Today’s Minis-Gilmer Outpatient Center at Savannah’s Candler Hospital bears witness to the Minis family’s philanthropy. Nunez himself quickly became a civic hero during a deadly fever epidemic. After he gave them cold baths and cool drinks, according to Oglethorpe, “some of the sickest experienced wonderful recoveries.”

Some later doctors became well known, too, such as the Waring father and son, who cared for yellow fever victims in 1820 and 1876, two of at least 12 scourges in Savannah before Dr. Walter Reed finally pinned the blame on the Aedes aegypti mosquito in 1900.

“There are still a lot of bugs, especially when you walk along the river,” Taylor admits. But at least they’re not usually lethal.

One by one, barriers against the original three verboten groups were breached.

When a 1734 coastal storm washed 40 Irish convicts ashore, Oglethorpe bought them as indentured servants. They and some later Irish arrivals were Protestants, but by 1791 there were enough Catholics to form a church. One in five Savannahians in 1850 was Irish, and today’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities are so big, the event is known as “the Mardi Gras of Savannah.”

In all, the city buzzes with 15 major festivals each year, plus more than 150 smaller celebrations.

The ban against “that pest and scourge of mankind called lawyers” lasted until 1755, when proliferating land disputes and crimes made it obvious that their profession was badly needed. Today the city has some 500 attorneys.

Oglethorpe opposed slavery as anti-humanitarian, but it was also banned because slaves were too expensive, there had been violent uprisings in other colonies, and, Oglethorpe feared the colonists would become lazy if others did their work. It was good thinking until the labor-intensive crops of rice and cotton replaced the silk economy.

Besides organizing “America’s first planned city,” starting with six grassy squares to be edged with homes and public buildings, Oglethorpe developed a plot along the Savannah River bluff as America’s first experimental agricultural station. (Still known as the Trustees’ Garden, it’s home to the popular, 250-year-old Pirates’ House Restaurant, originally the home of the colony’s gardener.) Several of the original crops , like peaches, prospered and are still grown in Georgia. But rice and cotton became kings, and by 1760, there were 3,500 slaves in the colony’s population of 9,500. On the eve of the Civil War, there were 8,000 slaves and 14,000 whites.

In today’s world, Otis S. Johnson, Savannah’s second black mayor, oversees a well-run city that incorporates several innovative departments and projects. The U.S.’s second black Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, is a Savannah native.

Early colonists wanted to start new lives, and the founding trustees had profit on their minds, but these days Savannah attracts “immigrants,” such as Taylor, for other reasons. “My joke is that for the last eight years I’ve been trying to get here,” he confides. “I got tired of cold, gray winters.”

A medical oncologist and hematologist with Summit Cancer Care, PC, Taylor grew up and completed his college and medical education in and near Philadelphia. But even balmy weather took second place to overriding professional considerations. “The medical climate is much more favorable in the South,” he says. “There’s greater demand for physicians here, malpractice insurance costs much less than in the North, all the technology I need is here, and there isn’t a specialty I have to send patients out of town for because we don’t have it here. Most important,” he says, “is the medical group I joined.”

While finishing a fellowship at the University of North Carolina in 2002, Taylor searched for partners who could mentor him in how to practice. The Summit group filled his bill. The partners were committed to morality and proper styles of care—and they represented diverse areas of the country, with knowledge and experience they could share with him.

Many a northerner has been wary of moving to a community where tight family traditions exclude newcomers, especially Savannah, where it’s been said you’re not considered a real member of society until you’ve married someone with the same last name as yours. Not true any longer, says Taylor. “I’m in a big melting pot in my profession.” Not only that, in the most important context, “None of the patients here is distrustful of Northerners.”

Ramesh Patwardhan, MD, is in a good position to agree with Taylor. A native of Madras, India, he came to the U.S. 31 years ago after medical school and residency in India. He practiced in Newark, NJ and western Oklahoma, with fellowship interludes in Omaha and at The Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia, MO.

Patwardhan is now the program director for the Cancer Care and Research Pavilion (CCRP) (under construction by St. Joseph’s/Candler Hospitals), but he had built a large private practice as a surgical oncologist after arriving in 1985. “People are very appreciative of everything that one does for them,” he says. “In a sense it’s a small-town atmosphere, still with some of the old southern charm. “In bigger places, like Chicago, New York, and New Jersey, people set up adversarial relationships.”

He echoes Taylor in another way, too. “My wife and I traveled all along the eastern seacoast looking for a place that’s warm and friendly and with reasonable taxes,” he remembers. A big plus for him is that he can play tennis all year long in this green paradise. For others, boating and water sports are the lure in a place located on two rivers and just a few minutes from the Intracoastal Waterway, not to mention the ocean itself. And, if Savannah’s eight golf courses aren’t enough for the stick-and-ball addicts, Hilton Head Island, with more than two dozen courses, is a short 45 minutes away.

Hardly any non-native physician reveling in Savannah’s near-perennial summer can say the climate wasn’t a draw for him. “I wear a winter jacket ten days a year,” revels Steve Ranicki, DC on a winter day when the best they can do in his home state of Michigan is 40 degrees while he basks in 80 degrees and watches azaleas burst into bloom.

William J. Hoskins, MD, had already gazed upon paradise some time before leaving New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and two top-level posts as in disease management and gynecology to become the director of the Curtis and Elizabeth Anderson Cancer Institute at Memorial Health University Medical Center, the third and newest of Savannah’s general hospitals. He and his wife already owned a winter home on nearby Amelia Island, and he had grown up and received his education in the near-south, with additional training and later positions in Florida.