By Brian Smith
I live on West Gwinnett St. next to a vacant lot. What some may deem “unoccupied space” is really the potential, but currently unrealized, central hub of our neighborhood, a rich grouping of families and individuals waiting for interaction. The lot serves as my house’s backyard, and my family of four senior undergraduate males is willing to share – but the posted potential for condos keeps it private.
The lot is teeming with ugly grass and wild weeds. The vegetation is sparse – plenty of sand and dirt shows beneath it. No trees grow in the lot – it’s flat and open. Broken glass is scattered all over the space. There are usually some empty beer bottles or cans in the center. Stray cats roam the small field – we dubbed a fat black and white one Cow Cat. There are others: Jimmy Sprinkles (portly, neighbor housecat), Wildcat (mountain lion appearance, stray) and even our own Cricket (when he occasionally escapes the house) frolic around in the tall grass and stalk pigeons. As exciting as this sounds, I’ve seen a lot more activity through our two West-facing kitchen windows than some simple cat-on-bird aggression.
One recent morning I was drinking my morning coffee and noticed a group of four college-aged men standing around a small remote-controlled helicopter in the lot. One of them held a large, two-handed controller; the rest had their hands stuffed in their jacket pockets. The helicopter spun up and lifted into the air, then dropped. I got my roommate to come watch. We observed for a few minutes. After a few more flight attempts, the helicopter overturned mid-air and went down for good, lodging its blades in the ground. Its engine whined a high pitch buzz and the four men jumped back from the tiny helicopter, covering their faces.
Technically, those guys were trespassing. So am I, every time I cross the lot to put my trash in the bins on its other side. No one seems to care. A landlord/contractor type with a gelled mini-mohawk hairdo owns the property. I’ve never seen him without his cell phone to his ear. It’s usually on speakerphone despite him pressing it to the side of his head. He turns up to the lot every 17th of March to tape off the area and rent space for expensive parade-goer parking. Otherwise, he takes minimal care of the space.
Earlier this year I witnessed a young girl mowing the lot. It took her an hour to mow the quarter-block-size square of grass that hot summer afternoon. She started at one corner and mowed a continuous spiral until she reached the center. Halfway there, she ran over our garden hose, severing its gun-style spray handle and probably sending it flying over the house across the street. The girl was miserable. She stopped every few seconds to wipe the sweat from her face or lift the push mower over something. I can’t forget her grimace on that muggy, white-hot day. On the border of the lot, the property owner sat in his pickup truck eating a burger and watching his grass be mowed to city ordinance compliancy. He was parked so close to his row of PVC and wooden signs (which have been posted for years), I can imagine him admiring them.
The first displays a new condo project, “West Gwinnett Street Condos,” complete with price range and mini-blueprint. The second displays that a local bank “proudly” finances the project. The third displays the name of its local contractor company, and that that company has achieved a mysteriously ambiguous “award winning” status, surrounded by quotation marks. Below their name and status is their poignant motto: “We restore Savannah.”
The act of restoration implies returning something to its original and usable, functioning condition. I’m not quite aware of what used to inhabit the empty lot, but I doubt it was a block of contemporary condos with “available off-street parking.” A true restoration of this type of space could be found elsewhere in the city. Savannah is famous for its layout of squares. Many neighborhoods in the Historic District surround small, maintained parks where open grass and communal space is available for public use. These squares act as backyards for neighborhoods where row-style housing isn’t conducive to having a suburban-style plot of personal, open land to host summer cookouts or birthday parties.
Those three signs have been up for years, but construction has yet to commence. It’s as if these signs are a warning – despite the existence of this central, open, inviting space, it has its end and shouldn’t be treated as anything but property until then, so go away. What contradicts that sign are the uninhabited condos on the other side of our house. A somewhat newly constructed block of them is two-doors-down from the lot, and has yet to be totally rented out. Why build more? What if the space were reconsidered, and used in the vain of a Savannah square? Finally, that guy with the German shepherd, the mystery family on the corner, the on-the-rocks father/son relationship, the artsy vintage clothiers, the Pedicab company and all our other neighbors could find a place to really be a community, instead of know each other by uninformed, assumptive descriptions.
Last Fourth of July, all of our house’s friends came over to celebrate. We stocked up on fireworks across the border, cooked some food out back and had a few beers. Later, we all went outside and shot bottle rockets up through the vacant sky of the lot. I can’t help but imagine all of our surrounding neighbors peering out at our patriotic display, expecting the police to show up and shoo us off the lot. They didn’t. All that remained there the next morning were some firecracker shells and those three signs foreboding the end of a potential community.
