July 10, 1995
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Savannah is a city of symmetry. It has straight streets, square squares – columns of spreading oak trees. It’s a city where you feel like you are somewhere, all the time. In Columbia Square, one of the shaded parks surrounded by homes that punctuate the city’s grid of streets, a group of 40-something men and women were laying out platters of food on card tables set out under the oak trees. They had that neatness peculiar to some middle-age Southerners. The men wore knit or button-down shirts tucked into shorts. The women wore dresses or Bermuda shorts. Everyone’s hair was combed ad met cleanly at the ear. Despite the preciseness of their dress, they were friendly, open and cheery, in a way that reminded me of New Orleans, where people have learned that life’s priorities are food and friendship, not careers and money. They urged me to join their annual Lark in the Park, the equivalent of a block party. “You must take a plate of food, I just insist,” said one woman who had befriended me. The card tables were starting to groan with platters of sliced tomatoes, cheesy casseroles and an entire pork loin, roasted and now sliced and waiting in its own juices. I figured they would be a pretty good bunch to ask about the Savannah College of Art and Design, the institution with 2,500 students and 261 faculty and staff that had come to dominate this city of 150,000 in just 15 years. Take any compass point out of the square and you would hit one of the college’s facilities, usually housed in a renovated 19th century building. “I have a small bakery near here,” said Wayne Spear, a balding man with a mustache. He wore a Ralph Lauren shirt, and my eye drifted to the little polo player galloping across a pink cotton weave. “I use the students for part-time help. I have some rental property, and the students have made its value go up tremendously. On the side streets around here, little shops are opening because the students have given them a market. People go out at night, because they feel safer with students out and about. The college has been great for this city.” Town people might complain about SCAD’s students funny hair styles, strange clothing, or typical college-like, obnoxious behavior. They might complain that SCAD founders, Richard and Paula Rowan, are power hungry, paranoid or make too much money. They might mention some of the other gossipy controversies that SCAD has accumulated in its 15-year history. But most people mention the overwhelmingly positive role this college has had on this Southern city known mainly for its ground-breaking role in historical preservation. SCAD, they say, has completed what preservations might call the adoptive reuse of a town built centuries ago for a different time and different economy. The students have infused the town’s lovely squares and homes with life, people, energy and money. It has sparked a new wave of renovations in the city’s Victorian district, where many houses are still abandoned and crumbling. Most of all, it has turned century-old structures difficult to use for a home, store or office – like abandoned power stations, cotton warehouses or multi-story elementary schools – into economic engines of the town, filled with students, faculty and equipment. Since its first classes in 1979, the college had grown from a few dozen students to 2,500. It occupies more than 35 buildings now, sprinkled throughout a roughly one-mile square area in the heart of the town’s historic district. The school offers degrees in architecture, art history, computer art, fashion, fibers, furniture design,graphic design, historic preservation, illustration, interior design, metals and jewelry, painting, photography, sequential art and video. Master’s and bachelor’s degrees are offered in all majors except architecture, which has the traditional five-year bachelor’s degree. Most town people are probably indifferent or unaware of the school’s educational innovations. But with its emphasis on small classes and the biggest and best equipment, with its relatively cheap tuition and lack of tenure, and most of all its use of historic buildings as an economical way of creating building space, the college is setting a different example on how to form an educational institution. The schools phenomenal rate of growth has left growing pains. Some departments are better than others. Students complain about an administration so hell-bent on expansion that it overhypes the school’s already excellent facilities. Professors have left or been fired because of disagreements with the school’s management style. A strange assortments of controversies and ill-will surround its founders, Richard and Paula Rowan.

Ultimately, the college’s success will depend on how all these parts interact – the students, the town, and the administration. Those parts include, perhaps most importantly, Richard and Paula Rowan, whose ambition and determination and vision may make or break the school – and to some extent the town as well. At the moment though, the college is saving Savannah from the twin fates that seem to await historic places, either decay, or a kind of sterilized embalmment. The city’s system of “squares” traces back to a plan by James Edward Oglethorpe in 1733, an idealist who created the colony as a haven for English debtors and others of “modest means” who “felt the weight of oppression and discrimination.” The town’s more laissez-faire attitude toward different lifestyles, personal eccentricities and varying religious faiths traces back to Oglethorpe, residents say. Designed for defense as well as beauty, Oglethorpe’s system of homes, schools and churches surrounding a square park was followed for the next 100 years as the city expanded. From only four squares in Oglethorpe’s tenure, the city eventually reached its zenith of 24 squares – which began disappearing during urban renewal in the 1950s as city fathers began demolishing squares for freeways and parking lots. They were opposed by a group of residents who struggled and largely succeeded in saving the street plan and the old homes from the redevelopment fate of freeways, plazas and office buildings.

I envisioned the city now as quaint homes, neatly tended gardens and lots of tourists, all enshrouded in grey Spanish moss. Much to my surprise, I also found plenty of decaying buildings, vacant lots and non-descript stores. I greeted each odd thread in the urban fabric with relief. To me, it signalled that Savannah was still a real city, still evolving, still struggling. The college fits in with this by making the city a growing, changing place, rather than only a museum.

THE SCHOOL: The floor of the furniture design studio tilts. In the 1880s, when this long narrow warehouse was built, it was designed so sweating laborers could more easily slide bales of cotton from where the freight trains would drop them off, across the 30-feet of weathered plank flooring, to where horse-drawn wagons would carry the bales to the harbor and waiting ships. Now, when a student needs a true level, they position their furniture on a shelf that juts out of one wall. The students work on long tables set up in a central room. Tiffany Arteaga, 21, a thin young woman, is leaning over a chunk of black walnut and filing its edges. It will be a shelf in a sinewy cabinet Arteaga is building. It’s a weird piece of furniture. The legs have gilded, bronze casts of horseshoe crab tails that stick out at intervals. It’s beautiful. I could easily see it in some high-priced gallery. Arteaga says it’s meant as an alter of sorts, a place to put powerful personal objects. She calls making such a cabinet the practice of Iconagraphy. Like all the students in this program I talk with, she loves the program.

“This place is excellent,” says Paul Buckman, 24 and a senior, who is working a few paces from Arteaga. He has dirty blond hair tied back, three gold earrings in his left ear and one in his right. A pack of Camel Lights pokes out of the pocket of his white T-shirt. Behind him, I see a wall covered with more than a hundred clamps of varying sizes on racks. “We have an incredible amount of space here for woodworking. We’ve got all the tools you need, a full machine room, plus a metal shop with metal lathes.”

The furniture design studio illustrates the college at its best. The students have all the things most schools are short in: space, equipment and time with skilled instructors. The only thing unusual about the furniture school, as compared to the rest of the college, is that you’re not surrounded by computers, although I saw one or two.

Savannah was always a port city and many of the industrial buildings SCAD is re-using relate back to when the city was a center of the cotton industry. As Roberta Brandes Gratz details in her excellent book, The Living City, Savannah’s industry, and the historic center city, declined in the 1920s with the devastation of the cotton crop by the boll weevil. The town re-industrialized in subsequent decades, but most of the money and growth went to the new suburbs that were ringing the city. The SCAD buildings give a nice portrait of the town’s economic as well as residential past. Hamilton Hall, for example, was the city’s first power station. Built in the 1890s, it now houses the school’s video department. Down in the basement, you can see the massive columns of stone and brick which once supported the steam turbines. The brick building, which overlooks the river, has a Romanesque-style facade that makes you wish contemporary city power buildings were similarly housed. One of the biggest clumps of SCAD buildings are the freight, office and repair sites left from an abandoned central train yard. It includes Kiah Hall, which looks like a Greek temple or the White House with its white columns, was originally offices for railroad executives. Another interesting set are the four former public schools SCAD inhabits. They vary from Henry Hall, a three-story red brick building with rich terra cotta and a majesterial front stairway, to Barnard Hall, with a Spanish-tile roof and a humbler, less showy presence.

These generally ornate buildings that provide the bulk of SCAD’s floor space provide a poetical counterweight to the stacks of MacIntoshes, digital photography equipment, laser printers and assorted high-tech toys that litter most rooms. The place clearly digs technology. It’s a nice balance, however, that an architecture student manipulating a three-dimensional design program does so in a 19th century room with soaring ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Marlborough Packard, a professor in the historic preservation department who somehow appropriately wore a seer-sucker jacket and a green bow tie, told the story of a student who, frustrated by a computer repeatedly crashing on her, left the building and went out to cry in one of Oglethorpe’s squares. “It’s a good place to sit and cry,” said Packard. He compared this setting with what he calls “the neo-penal colony architecture” of “gates and grates” that dominates most new colleges built on raw tracts of land.

As might be expected, Packard is part of one of the more dynamic departments. With the college renovating several buildings each year, the students have their craft directly in front of their face. While a separate professional construction crew actually perform the bulk of the work, students also participate. They learn about the decisions involved in taking an abandoned shell into a working, 20th century building. When not inside abandoned buildings, students learn about real-estate, and now to start and manage a historic preservation program. The department is part of the School of Building Arts, which includes architecture and interior design. Students from these separate majors will often work collaboratively on a project. All of SCAD’s departments, not just historic preservation, are oriented to sending students out to find jobs. The video students train to work as production hands on TV commercials and sit-coms. The graphic design majors practice making magazine covers. “We do not have the attitude, ‘Oh, we are going to turn out 7,000 starving artists and we don’t care,’ ” said Judith Van Baron, the college’s vice-president of Academic Affairs. “Parents think of college as an investment. They want something solid, that emphasizes quality and careers. We are career oriented. We think that is important.”

Given the school’s overall contribution to the town – the school estimates its economic impact is estimated at $300 million annually – it is surprising how many critics the school has. Basically, some say the school has treated both its professors and the townspeople autocratically and disrespectfully, and that this has led to turmoil within the school and around it. Even the most positive student mentions fairly quickly the instability the school has experienced.

“The politics are terrible,” said Buckman, the T-shirted furniture design student, in a set of typical remarks. “I disagree with how they treat professors. We’ve had some seriously good professors leave because of disagreements, although we had really good ones come in to replace them. But it’s tough when you build up a relationship and people leave.”

SCAD does not have a tenure system. In this, it follows a trend around the country of colleges either eliminating tenure or tightening controls over it. This has enabled the school to pay relatively good salaries but has also contributed to criticism that the school treats is professors cavalierly. Van Baron calls tenure “a dinosaur system” that promotes academic privilege rather than good learning.

THE TOWN It’s a Friday night at Oglethorpe House, the school’s freshmen dormitory fashioned out of an 1960s-era Ramada Inn. Teenagers are wandering from room to room, talking, gossiping, giggling. The building is unusual for SCAD in that it has little historic value. “This is the fun dorm; I really like it,” said a young man wearing a white Grateful Dead T-shirt and a Scooby-Doo scraggle of a beard. He speaks from the open-air hallway that rooms front on. From the hallway, you can see into each room because the front wall of each bedroom doubles as both a window and a wall. Some students draw their curtains, and you can see the typical undergraduate pile of books, computers, stereo equipment and clothes. Trash is strewn everywhere in the halls. Savannah residents have a particularly direct interface with this scene because the main building is turned sideways to the street, with the open-air hallways and the glass-windowed dormitory rooms fronting on Oglethorpe Street. It resembles an ant colony under glass. Passersby can stare at an entire wall of student life. By college standards, this Friday night scene is not too unruly. I theorize that art students are less Animal-House like than most undergrads. Still, I wonder how much beer has spilled from these balconies, how loudly bass notes have thumped from stereos. I imagine vomiting amid the Spanish moss. SCAD has no campus in the traditional sense. It’s “quad” is the city of Savannah. This is wonderful. Colleges usually hold themselves aloof from the cities they inhabit. SCAD’s structure literally forces students and professors into interacting with regular citizens. It’s like taking a regular college set around a central plot of grass and turning it inside out. But the school’s use of a city as a campus has a number of ripples. It is, to some extent, the use of public space for private purposes. The college does not have to pay to maintain a traditional campus. As the school grows, I wonder how the relationship between town and gown will go. Many residents love the students because they put money in their pockets and make the streets safer at night. Initially, though, the college had sour relationships with the town. It was due partly to narrow-mindedness on townspeople’s part, but also to what appeared to be autocratic and paranoid behavior by SCAD. SCAD has sued several of its critics and professors who have left the school, alleging they attempted to defame the school and hurt its business. Using court documents, the Savannah News Press published a front-page story last year that told how SCAD had secretly photographed and surveilled possible critics of the school as they went about their lives. One former SCAD employee testified that he had been instructed to photograph people who attended bond or zoning hearings and voiced positions contrary to SCAD.

The city’s established preservation leaders are mixed on the school’s track record. One of the school’s biggest supporters, Lee Adler, said most established preservation leaders initially hindered the school more than they helped it. Adler, now 72 and wearing a soft-summer suit and a red bow tie, led the drive in the 50s and 60s to save Savannah’s historic downtown, often against considerable odds. “Thirty years ago, town fathers would have traded six of these squares for two tall buildings,” Adler said with a laugh. “They wanted to be another Jacksonville.” He also led the drive to renovate Savannah’s Victorian District, a section of town adjacent to the oldest historic area developed with ornate 19th and early 20th century homes. Adler fought not only to save the homes but to keep the neighborhood’s heavily black population in place, at a rent they could afford. Adler has gained fame recently as the nemesis of the more or less protagonist of the recent bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt. The volume opens up Savannah like an oyster and in the city is simply referred to as “the book.” Adler is portrayed as the talented, but stuffy opponent of Jim Williams, the more colorful character who shoots his lover and struggles with a trial. The unstated debate in the book seemed to be whether Adler was a pompous know-it-all who hogged too much credit for saving historic Savannah, or whether his detractors were small-minded Southerners who didn’t like a Jew who put too much emphasis on saving homes for Negroes. “I always say that the college is the best thing that happened to the town in 20 years, and it’s only been here 15,” Adler said. “It brought back vitality to the inner city. My feeling is that the college has set a national example. I’ve been amazed at how far Richard has taken it. But the average upper-middle class resident who lived in a renovated 18th century townhouse didn’t see it that way at first, Adler said. Residents protested vociferously, Adler said, when SCAD first proposed renovating a beautiful red building with a turret on Pulaski Square and making it a girls dormitory. “You’d have thought it was the end of the world,” Adler said. “Now, of course, they see it’s been about the best thing that ever happened to them.”

Of course, it probably didn’t help matters that, according to the Savannah News-Press, SCAD photographed and surveilled the leader of the downtown neighborhood group opposing the dormitories in an attempt to prove a conspiracy against the school. “I think it is fair to say that in the early days there were a few bumpy times,” said Stephanie Churchill, president of the Historic Savannah Foundation. “It was partly because the college didn’t follow the rules when it was renovating buildings. But it’s normal that whenever there is any change in the status quo, you are going to wonder how it’s going to work out.” Despite the school’s at times bizarre behavior, which obviously increased resentment against the school, I suspected Adler was right about many of the neighborhood leaders who first opposed SCAD. The skeptical attitude Adler described captured a short-sightedness and narrow mindedness that I had noticed over the years in writing about neighborhoods and historic preservation. “We don’t want any skateboards, we don’t want any rollerblades,” Adler said, mimicking SCAD’s critics. “It’s like the Goddamn Republicans. Instead of Ofamily values,’ they talk about Oquality of life.’ Instead of embracing the college, it was, ‘We don’t want any tour buses, we don’t want this.’ It was nit-picking.” THE PRESIDENT Richard Rowan, the school’s founder and president, stood in the middle of the abandoned train repair depot, light streaming through the broken panes of cathedral sized windows, chortling with glee. “This is wonderful, just wonderful,” said Rowan, turning round and round, looking at the weathered brick walls, the concrete floor in laid with rusty railroad tracks, the soaring roof and the massive steel I-beams holding it up. “This is the most excellent space I’ve ever seen.” This would not be most people’s first remark. Overgrown with weeds and vines, the massive, 150,000 square feet of building had small trees growing out of one section, liberally kept watered through the smashed skylights. But Rowan sees that the brick walls are sound, as are the steel frames in the broken-out windows. The concrete floor in the central room, which is above a cavernous basement, once supported 13 locomotive engines. It isn’t going anywhere. The wooden roof may be in tatters, but the steel girders that support it are fine. So. Pour some concrete across the floor. Put glass in the windows. Put a metal roof on, while keeping the massive skylights. Wire it. Plumb it. Presto. You have SCAD’s new design center, filled with studios and classrooms. “It doesn’t take great vision to see green metal instead of rotting wood,” Rowan says. “To say, ‘pour some concrete across this floor.’ I don’t think you could build something like this now with this much structural integrity.” A million dollars will renovate it, Rowan says. Come back in a year. Normally, such an effort might cost $5 million, Rowan says, but SCAD has its own construction crew. Rowan says his final cost per square foot should be about $7 per square foot. On the average, Rowan says ready-to-use building space costs him $19 per square foot compared to an average of $140 per square foot at colleges across the country. The man who stands amid the abandoned train workshop is the same man who, 16 years ago, stood with his wife in an abandoned armory and ripped out walls with his bare hands. Even Rowan won’t admit to having the vision of seeing how far that would lead.

Richard and his wife Paula got the idea for starting the school when Richard was working in the late 70s for the Atlanta Board of Education. Both just in their 20s then, they admit to having little background in the arts other than appreciating them. But Richard was convinced that the future of higher education lay in specialized education. And the south lacked a major arts and design school. The decision to rehab so many of Savannah’s historic buildings was a decision prompted by both economics and aesthetics.

The Rowans embody the school’s strength and weaknesses. If they are to be credited with great vision, great perseverance, they also must take some responsibility for the aura of controversy and resentment that has settled around the school. A lot of people are mad at SCAD. The allegations, in brief, are these. The Rowans make too much money – combined salaries of $602,000 in 1992-93, one of the highest of any college or university in the country. The Rowans fire or sue anyone who criticizes the school. The Rowans spy on professors and critics. The Rowan over-hype their school, advertising buildings and projects that are still unfinished. The controversies came to a boiling point in 1992 and 93, when students and faculty protested, board members resigned and a flurry of lawsuits ensued. New York’s School of Visual Arts eventually opened a Savannah branch, hiring former SCAD faculty, and SCAD sued the competing school and assorted other folk. The cutline to the photo in the 1992 New York Times article by Peter Applebome neatly summarized the debate that many still have about SCAD: “The Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia is considered either a model of entrepreneurial education, the largest of its kind in the nation, or a college more concerned with money and power than education.” Applebome described the school’s lack of tenure, how professors were pressured to fund raise and recruit students, how the school’s administration was liberally seeded with Rowan family members, and various incidents, like the allegation that Richard Rowan had an outside accrediting team bugged. Applebome included the charge that the school’s board of trustees did not properly supervise the Rowans. Applebome quoted Pat Conroy, the novelist who resigned from the college’s board. Conroy said that he believed he never voted on a single thing in his two years on the board. He said he resigned “because I was afraid that if I stayed on it, I would end up up jail.”

There is too much smoke here not to be some fire. But still, when the charges and counter-charges are sifted, you come up with more style than substance. The priorities of the school seem to be, judging from my unmonitored wanderings around the school: the best equipment, close professor to student relationships, and moderately-priced tuition. From a student’s perspective, that’s a pretty good set of priorities. Most of the students I spoke with sounded like the one student quoted in the 1992 NYT article: “The facilities and the faculty are just great,” said a photography student. “It’s the administration that’s just a little screwed up.” Richard Rowan does not apologize for any of the school’s action or practices, except for a lack of diplomatic skills in the college’s early years. Many of the school’s critics, he said, were attempting to destroy the school and he expects to win big from the lawsuit that is still in court. People are free to say what they like, Rowan said, but the fruit of false speech “is usually a tort.”

The dark cloud of controversy that hung over the school two years ago has largely lifted. It won the prestigious 1994 National Trust Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Its expansion plans are going forward. The school is considering adding a department of performing arts, which would add a bright new dimension to the town and school. The school has already bought a darkened theater on the city’s old main street.

Townspeople are aware of the light and dark sides of the school’s character. Although they compliment the school for revitalizing downtown, they mention resentment contretemps such as the college surveiling professors and residents. They would like the school to be a good neighbor. As the school grows, both its officials and town leaders will have plenty of chances to build this relationship – or tear it down. As the college faces zoning and building permit hearings for its future renovations, towns people and school officials can either cooperate and communicate, or end up dueling before the City Council in the farcical confrontations that have become so common in contemporary America. Both sides have a lot to gain from the other. The college’s plan for starting a school of performing arts has enormous potential for revitalizing both the college and the town. The city has several dark or underused theaters, and having dancers and musicians filling the squares as well as painters and architects would be nice.

Still, as the school grows – Rowan hopes to double its size – it will test the adaptability of Oglethorpe’s famous squares. So, far they have proved remarkably elastic. The students and professors that fill them now, along with residents and business people, seem only to enhance them, make them more robust. As any New Yorker knows, a well-used park is easier to maintain than one that is vacant most of the day. It’s a compliment to Oglethorpe that this town designed for carriages and horses, when a shopping mall, an office tower or an elevator were as yet undreamt, has so easily absorbed cars, computers and a college.