This is the City Talk column by Bill Dawers, a longtime contributor to the Savannah Morning News.
As reported recently in this newspaper, the City of Savannah is pursuing an update to its National Historic Landmark District nomination from the National Park Service (NPS).
The city’s goals are laudable. In a letter to the NPS, the city’s director of urban design and planning, Bridget Lidy, detailed the need to update the nomination to comply with current standards and explored other possibilities.
Lidy has been with the city since 2006 and worked for the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority for six years before that, at a time when the SDRA had a lot more teeth than it does now. She has witnessed the downtown development pressures and controversies firsthand and surely knows how complicated the NHLD changes could become.
A key point in Lidy’s letter involves updating the period of significance for the district, which was officially extended to 1934 in the mid-1980s. The date may feel arbitrary, but 1934 meant that 50-year-old buildings at the time of the extension might qualify as contributing resources.