#81 1955 · Historic Savannah Foundation · Historic preservationrecycle-the-capital
Savannah saved condemned buildings not with a landmark law but by buying, restricting, and reselling them forever
the problem
Historic buildings kept getting demolished, and the city had no landmark law and no fund to stop it
background
In 1955, demolition of Savannah's 1870 City Market and the threatened demolition of the 1820 Davenport House for a parking lot galvanized seven women to found the Historic Savannah Foundation — at a time the city had no zoning protection for historic buildings and no public money earmarked to buy and hold them. The obvious paths were both dead ends: lobbying for a landmark ordinance would take years city officials showed no appetite for, and buying buildings outright to preserve them forever would exhaust any donor base within a handful of purchases.
The foundation instead treated ownership as a temporary tool rather than an end state: buy an endangered building, attach a permanent preservation covenant to the deed, then resell it to a vetted buyer committed to restoring it — and put the sale proceeds straight back into buying the next endangered building. Sources don't pin the exact year this specific revolving-fund structure was formalized versus the foundation's 1955 founding; it developed over the years immediately after.
the move
The mechanism let the same pool of money save one building after another indefinitely instead of being spent once: acquisition, stabilization, a vetted resale to a preservation-minded buyer bound by a perpetual covenant, then reinvestment of the proceeds in the next property — a structure that became known nationally as a preservation 'revolving fund.'
the payoff
By the mid-1960s the foundation had turned $38,000 in option purchases into $1 million of reinvestment in a single thirteen-acre district (Pulaski Square–West Jones Street), and over its first fifty years the foundation is credited with directly saving more than 350 Savannah buildings.
what came after
The revolving-fund model was adopted by preservation groups across the US and is now standard practice taught throughout the preservation field — Historic Savannah Foundation's early version is generally credited as one of the first in the country, the origin of a technique rather than a copy of one.
references
- [1]Historic Savannah Foundation — Revolving FundHistoric Savannah Foundation, 2024myhsf.org
- [2]New Georgia Encyclopedia — Historic Savannah FoundationNew Georgia Encyclopedia, 2023georgiaencyclopedia.org