Good news, bad news with relocation of Central Precinct

Savannah officials held a ribbon cutting last week for the new Central Precinct at 1710 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., but the police officers had already been in the new space for more than a week by the time of the grand opening.

I live close to the old precinct at Bull and 31st streets, but I did not realize the move had been completed until late one night when I was walking home from the American Legion Post #135.

The parking lots and streets around the Bull Street precinct were busy during shift changes, and the gunning engines and occasional sirens were reminders throughout the day of the police presence, but the station was quiet much of the time.

Still, it was jarring to see the building entirely unused after so many years of activity.

The city had been renting that Bull Street precinct from Bull Street Baptist Church, which is selling the entire block. Lat Purser & Associates, Inc. plans to construct a four-story building with 81 apartments and five retail spaces at street level.

I am wary about the extended period of inactivity and am not looking forward to the many months of construction, but the eventual new residents and commercial tenants will contribute mightily to the vitality of the neighborhood. In terms of public safety, the additional eyes on the street will more than make up for the loss of a constant police presence.

The project will return valuable land to the tax rolls and adhere to some key principals of sound neighborhood design with the commercial units on Bull Street and the parking accessible via the lane.

The precinct’s move is also good news for the police officers. The former digs were simply not adequate for the important work being done inside. The improved facilities and working conditions at the new precinct on MLK should increase job satisfaction and lead to better policing in the neighborhood.

But, as I detailed in a column earlier this year, the precinct’s relocation will not necessarily lead to reduced crime in Cuyler-Brownsville as officials predicted during the site selection process. There isn’t even optimal street connectivity between the station and the neighborhood west of MLK.

City officials are understandably eager to present the new precinct as a model of what can be achieved by the Special Purpose Local Options Sales Tax, the renewal of which will be decided by Chatham County voters in November.

However, now that the precinct is open, voters can now see for themselves the design issues identified last year by neighborhood residents.

The new precinct essentially faces its own parking lot rather than either MLK or Montgomery Street. Many of the parking spaces will sit empty. The north side of the new precinct is a big blank wall, which was necessary for security reasons but detracts from any sense of neighborhood connectivity.

The bigger issues lie in what voters can no longer see on the site. To make room for the precinct, the city demolished two blocks of historic Meldrim Row, a series of modest cottages developed for African-American workers in the late 19th century.

Even into the 21st century, those cottages served as affordable housing occupied primarily by black households in a gentrifying neighborhood that has rapidly transformed from majority black to majority white.

The blocks around the new Central Precinct are in two U.S. Census tracts that together comprise most of the western half of the Thomas Square neighborhood. Between 2000 and 2010, the black population declined by 34 percent in one of those tracts and by 50 percent in the other.

The 2020 Census will certainly show that those longstanding trends have continued.

I should note that the demolition of those blocks of Meldrim Row happened under the previous city administration, so one cannot blame Mayor Eddie DeLoach or the aldermen now completing their first terms.

The fact that the project was launched under a black mayor and black city manager obscured the ugly symbolism of the demolition of homes so important in the city’s African-American history for the construction of a police station on a street named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.