SAVANNAH — Richard Shinhoster has long believed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard will be reborn.
Decades after he closed his first business on the western edge of Savannah’s National Historic Landmark District, he returned to the same building with optimism in the early 2000s. Now with a push from local elected officials and long-awaited federal support, Shinhoster and others hope the city will be able to remove a literal barrier to revitalizing the neighborhood.
“Some revitalization has already taken place in spurts for a few years. However, the flyover always was an area of demarcation,” Shinhoster said.
The flyover is part of the elevated terminus of I-16, completed in the late 1960s to connect Savannah to Macon. Drivers enter the highway via a ramp on MLK Jr. Boulevard and exit onto Montgomery Street in the heart of the historic district.
While much of downtown has flourished in recent years, neighborhoods near the flyover have lagged. That includes west Savannah, which once was the center of the city’s Black business community, and where Shinhoster grew up and set up shop.
Shinhoster has another personal connection to the flyover. It is officially named the Earl T. Shinhoster Interchange in memory of his brother, a civil rights leader who died in 2000. But the local business owner, and other area residents, want it gone.
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Discussions about removing the flyover, restoring the parts of the street grid it disrupted, and redeveloping the land date back to at least the 1990s.
Those calls increased after the city overhauled another nearby highway interchange as part of the creation of the Canal District, an area surrounding the newly opened Enmarket Arena. The revamped interchange provides easy access to the sports and entertainment venue to the west and the Historic District to the east, making the flyover less necessary.
Savannah city leaders took a significant step toward the flyover’s removal in December, approving an agreement with the Georgia Department of Transportation for preliminary engineering. In March, Sen. Raphael Warnock and Sen. John Ossoff said money for the project is included in a federal infrastructure bill.
“I grew up in Savannah, in the shadow of the I-16 flyover, and I know what removing it would mean for folks in the neighborhood,” Warnock said in a statement.
It won’t happen overnight, though. The planning process will take three to four years, according to the city.
Flyover fallout
There is a parking lot next to Diaspora Marketplace, the store Shinhoster opened almost 25 years ago at the corner of MLK and Gaston streets. He said a Black movie theater was there in the days before the flyover was built. Other Black- and immigrant-owned businesses thrived in the corridor, serving a diverse customer base who lived and worked in neighborhoods like Frogtown, Currietown, Cuyler-Brownsville and Carver Village.
But many residents were poor and property values were low. When the government was looking to secure land for the interstate as part of midcentury urban renewal programs, residents and businesses were displaced, and 60-year-old Union Station, considered an architectural treasure, was demolished in 1963.
“I think it’s no accident that I-16 comes into the city where it does because that’s where the land was the cheapest,” said Ellen Harris of Ethos Preservation, who co-chairs the flyover removal coalition. “ … Maybe there wasn’t an ill intention there, maybe that was just a strategic economic decision, but it certainly had the most negative effect on the most vulnerable people.”
Credit: Sarah Peacock
Credit: Sarah Peacock
Shinhoster said he opened a record store at MLK (then called West Broad Street) and Gaston around the time I-16 was completed, but by the early 1970s he had to close it down.
“Our business thrived for the first two to three years, and then we began to notice that the neighborhoods were changing and the people that were our customers were no longer living within walking distance to us,” Shinhoster said. “Many of the people were going out to the mall and to the southside.”
The MLK/Montgomery Street corridor was described in a 2012 study as a “street network that caters to high-speed automobile traffic, is hostile to pedestrians and bicyclists, and lacks connectivity in both the east-west and north-south directions.”
In addition to cutting off communities from downtown, according to the study, the flyover disrupted one of the city’s best-known features: the historic grid pattern introduced by the Georgia colony’s founder, Gen. James Oglethorpe.
The Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission, which published the study, recommended removing the flyover and exit ramps at MLK and Montgomery.
The flyover removal appeared on a long list of regional transportation projects that would have been funded by a sales tax, which failed in a 2012 referendum.
An Interchange Modification Report in 2015 found that removing the flyover would improve safety and traffic flow into downtown because “more than enough Interstate access is available within this corridor,” with five access points within 1.5 miles.
The Federal Highway Administration requires an IMR before changes can be made to the interstate system. But the report wasn’t forwarded by Georgia’s Department of Transportation, again stalling efforts, according to critics of the flyover.
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
‘Everything is in alignment now’
When Warnock was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2021 “and was very supportive of this project, we thought, ‘OK, this is the opportunity to see if we can get some federal assistance and federal pressure to make this happen,’” Harris said.
Warnock was raised at Kayton Homes, a public housing community south of the flyover.
In 2021, Historic Savannah Foundation President Susan Adler explored improving the look of Savannah’s downtown entryways and helped broaden the removal push.
The coalition made a presentation to City Council in early 2022. The next year, the city completed its application for a $1.8 million grant in the federal infrastructure bill. A separate federal grant earmarks about $700,000 for engineering.
In February of this year, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped at Diaspora Marketplace, Shinhoster’s store, during an official visit to Savannah.
Bridget Lidy, the city’s director of planning and urban design, said the planning to remove the flyover will include conceptual design, environmental studies, public outreach and equitable redevelopment.
“It seems as though everything is in alignment now,” Lidy said.
Earlier studies projected that removing the flyover would reclaim about 8 acres of developable land. Proponents have suggested it be used for affordable housing, business development, and public space.
Affordable housing is key to reestablishing community in the corridor, according to Shinhoster, because “it would allow people (to) not only work in this area but live in the area, as it was when it was West Broad Street.”
He also wants green space to be part of the redevelopment — and to have it named for Earl Shinhoster, his deceased brother and civil rights leader.
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