Savannah - Backgroud - Overview

Savannah's airport , served by several major airlines, is eight miles west of the city. A taxi to downtown costs around $20. The bus station is on the western edge of downtown at 610 W Oglethorpe Ave, while the train station is about three miles southwest, at 2611 Seaboard Coastline Drive. The latter isn't served by buses; a taxi from the station to downtown usually costs about $8.

The Historic District is best explored on foot, but if you want to get further out, Chatham Area Transit (CAT; tel 912/233-5767) operates a reasonable bus network (75) and a free trolley service that runs between downtown, the visi-tor center and the city market. Route maps are available from the visitor center , 301 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (MonFri 8.30am5pm, Sat & Sun 9am5pm; tel 912/944-0455 or 1-877/SAVANNAH, www.savannahvisit.com ), which also has accommodation discount coupons and sells $8 DayPasses that entitle visitors to unlimited parking at all city meters and garages for two days. In addition, the visitor center can provide details of countless walking tours , and serves as the starting point for several different trolley tours , costing around $1723 per hour. For $17, you can also join leisurely, breezier horse-and-carriage tours , most romantic by moonlight (tel 912/236-6756). The best black heritage tours are run by the King-Tisdell Cottage, while river cruises start from behind City Hall, for $14.95 and up (tel 912/232-6404). Bicycles can be rented from Bicycle Link, 22 W Broughton St (tel 912/233-9401).

American towns don't come much nicer than SAVANNAH , seventeen miles up the Savannah River from the ocean, on the border with South Carolina. The appealing Historic District , ranged around Spanish-moss-swathed squares, formed the core of the original city, and today boasts examples of just about every architectural style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the atmospheric cobbled waterfront on the Savannah River , key to the postwar economy, is edged by towering old cotton warehouses.

Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe as the first settlement of the new British colony of Georgia. His intention was to establish a haven for debtors, with no Catholics, lawyers or hard liquor, and above all, no slaves. However, with the arrival of North Carolinan settlers in the 1750s, the town became a major export center, at the end of important railroad lines by which cotton was funneled from far away in the South. Sherman arrived here in December 1864 at the end of his March to the Sea; he offered the town to Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift, but at Lincoln's urging left it intact and set to work apportioning land to freed slaves. This was the first recognition of the need for ''reconstruction,'' though such concrete economic provision was rarely to occur again.

The plantations floundered after the Civil War; cotton prices slumped, and Savannah went into decline. There was little industry beyond the port, and as that fell into disuse and decay, so too did Savannah's graceful townhouses and tree-lined boulevards. Not until the 1960s did local citizens start to organize what has been, on the whole, the successful restoration of their town recently, and tentatively, extended to the predominantly Victorian District .

Savannah has acquired a new notoriety of late thanks to its starring role in John Berendt's best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ; For a sense of what goes on behind closed doors in the city, it's an unbeatable read, and locals delight in making dark hints as to how much they knew, or even did, themselves. If you want to look behind the closed doors for yourself, however, few locations in ''The Book'' as it's universally known are open to the public, and none is likely to satisfy your curiosity.