From the 1950s up until the 1970s, old town Savannah, Georgia was in bad shape. You had the same white flight to the suburbs all of America saw with integration and the dominance of the automobile, and as with many old seaports, the rise of container shipping, and the resulting decimation of portside stevedore jobs and the bars that catered to them, had that Peach State jewel on the ropes.
Circa 1954, developers there succeeded in demolishing the city’s historic City Market (to make way for a freaking surface parking lot; we know the drill all too well), and that is where the people of Savannah drew the line — after that, in a powerful way too—seldom-imitated in the bidness-friendly cities of the Old South, Savannah went preservationist.
Which wasn’t a magic bullet. The movement got underway in the mid 1950s, but 15 years later, many of the historic buildings it had saved — often old merchant houses and old-school commercial buildings — remained vacant.
So, you had an alluring, historic city with lots of empty buildings scattered about. And this being Georgia, educational opportunities were not the same as you might find in a state like New York or Massachusetts, especially in the arena of airy-fairy fields like art and design.
Enter SCAD — the Savannah College of Art and Design. Invented from nothing in 1978, SCAD today is internationally renowned as a sort of high-tech vocational school for designers and commercial artists employing 2,000 faculty and staff servicing an enrollment of 15,000 students.
Today. Like I said, it didn’t exist until 1978. And then, instead of building a campus — get this — they moved piecemeal into some of Savannah’s previously-believed-to-be-old-and-in-the-way buildings. There is no SCAD campus per se; just scattered outposts — offices here, galleries there, classrooms in another historic building.
“The whole city is your main campus which is incredible,” said fashion designer Wes Gordon, in a testimonial on the school’s site. “I'm completely envious of all the students here for the ability to spend four years studying at SCAD.”
So…why not something like that in Galveston, easily the most Savannah-like city in Texas? I have long held that young students of a romantic, artistic temperament — odd ducks like yours truly — would love the chance to study in Galveston, just as they would in New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond and Savannah, all of which offer plentiful opportunities for creative types to get their liberal arts or similar degrees, but which Galveston decidedly does not.
Instead, Galveston has a community college and not one but two schools for science types: UTMB and A&M-Galveston, home of the Sea Aggies.
The two main degree programs there are marine business administration and marine biology. Yes, it kind of made sense to have that school there, though less now with A&M-Corpus getting so large, but why do we Texans have to be so literal? Galveston is not just on the coast, it is also beautiful. )
So why not create something similar to SCAD in Galveston for the history buffs and English mavens, the artists and the poets, the fashion designers and so on? I think the benefits to Galveston would be tremendous. It would bring jobs to the city and even more money from the students and their families. It would breathe new life into some of the old crumbling buildings Galveston still can’t figure out what to do with.
In due time it would create an alumni base devoted to dear old G-Town, and some alums would stay and start businesses and create jobs. Who knows — maybe one of those students would write a book like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that would make Galveston a destination for more than just weekenders from Texas and cruise port meat on the hoof.
Galveston has followed Savannah’s lead before. It was on a 1970s visit to Savannah that both inspired George Mitchell to spearhead the rejuvenation of The Strand district and taught him some of the tactics he and his foundation have used ever since. I am not sure why he didn’t copy their idea for a university; perhaps it’s because he was, after all, an Aggie, and they are not fond of such frippery as poems and paintings. (I kid, sort of.)
So what’s the catch?
Yeah yeah hurricanes. On that score I will say this: It makes more sense to have an arts school there in the path of these storms than UTMB, who threatens to pull up stakes every time their operations get decimated by Ike-level storms. One of these days, they probably will leave, but I hope it doesn’t take the departure of UTMB to bring about the founding of an artsy university in Galveston.
But hey, the idea is sitting here if you need it, my dear Sand Crab cousins.*
*Back in the old days, when our cities were neck-and-neck rivals, Houstonians called Galvestonians Sand Crabs and they called us “Mud Turtles.”
Good idea, OK Galveston Chamber of Commerce, you have a project that does not involve figuring out how to extract more money from short-term visitors!
Great idea. Not the fanciest place but not the heel hole described either