Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The business district in Savannah was frozen in a perpetual 1959—the Woolworth store
didn't appear to have changed its stock since about then. There was a handsome old movie
house, Weis's, but it was shut. Downtown movie houses are pretty much a thing of the past
inAmerica, alas,alas.YouarealwaysreadinghowbuoyantthemovieindustryisinAmer-
ica,butallthetheatersnowareatshoppingmallsinthesuburbs.Yougotothemoviesthere
andyougetachoiceofadozenpictures,buteachtheaterisaboutthesizeofalargefridge-
freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine
that?Canyouimaginemovietheaterswithoutbalconies?Tomegoingtothemoviesmeans
sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto
the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing
Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber
left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were
practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the
screen, it would stick with an interesting pock sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for
everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the af-
ternoon bombarding the screen.
Youhadtobecarefulwhenyoudidthisbecausethetheatermanageremployedviciousush-
erettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn't been
born into Hitler's Germany, who patrolled the aisles with highpowered flashlights look-
ing for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting
lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing posi-
tion with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be
carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always
assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before
beingturnedovertothepoliceforalongperiodofmental readjustment inareformschool.
Thosewerethedays!Youcannottellmethatsomesuburbanmultiplexwithshoeboxtheat-
ers and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and com-
munity spirit of a cavernous downtown movie house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet,
but ours could well be the last generation for which moviegoing has anything like a sense
of magic.
On this sobering thought I strolled down to Water Street, on the Savannah River, where
therewasanewriversidewalk.TheriveritselfwasdarkandsmellyandontheSouthCaro-
lina side opposite there was nothing to look at but down-at-heel warehouses and, further
downriver,factoriesdispensingbillowsofsmoke.Buttheoldcottonwarehousesoverlook-
ing the river on the Savannah side were splendid. They had been restored without being
overgentrified.Theycontainedboutiquesandoysterbarsonthegroundfloor,buttheupper
floors were left a tad
