- Associated Press - Saturday, January 18, 2020

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - As the 1950s and ’60s found the Eastside Theater hosting the premiere entertainment for black Savannahians on the eastside, the following decades would not be as kind. While during its heyday, the theater would see matinee movies, live performances and 15-cent popcorn, the next decades would see the decay of the roof, the isolation of the property and the disappearance of its community purpose for the neighborhood.

While the Eastside Theater, located on the corner of East Gwinnett and Broad Streets, would not see itself used for nearly 10 years after closing in 1969, it would avoid the same fate as a number of other black movie theaters in the Savannah. The Star would burn down in 1972, and the Dunbar would join the rest of its neighborhood when it was demolished to make way for Interstate 16.

Next door, the Melody Theater would be reinvented as St. James AME Church - keeping the facade of the theater in place.

Bernice Rivers, who at 92 has lived just off Broad Street nearly her entire life, said she remembers the neighborhood being mostly black, but that has changed over the years.

“I used to sit on my porch a lot. The school is there now, so you see a lot of black children. On Halloween, when you give out candy, there are no black (kids). Because it’s gone,” she said. “It used to be completely black …. they tore most of the homes down, and the ones they built now, tourists live in them.”

Rivers said many of the other African American residents around her found better paying work in larger cities, such as Atlanta or Charlotte, North Carolina, after integration, and fled their homes in Savannah to pursue those.

“I guess they could just do better. … I think as people could do better to help themselves, they left. A lot of my friends went north,” she said. “I wasn’t going to sell the house and was still single. My sisters and brothers got married and used to ask me, ‘Bernice, how could you stay?’ I would say, ‘Where am I going?’”

Local historian Charles Elmore said that there was “a lot of black history on East Broad Street” but a lot of that is going away. The structures of St. Pius X High School and the housing for the nuns who worked at the Catholic school have made way for new buildings for the city of Savannah and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“The whole character (of the neighborhood) has changed,” he said. “The whole demographics have changed.”

After being transferred to an independent owner once the theater went under, Omega Properties & Investments purchased the lot in 1977 and still owns it today. During the early 1980s, the Hungry World Missionary inhabited the space, with the old theater marquee still inscribed with that title. The mission left in 1981, and any sort of public or private use has been nascent in the building ever since.

What happens with the old theater seems tied to the neighborhood at large, as the community familiar with the Saturday matinees at the Eastside have either moved away or grown too old. The concern now for the space is whether it will survive much longer, with residents concerned it could become encompassed in the city’s blighted property program, which would spell the demolition of the old theater structure.

“One of the concerns we have (with the city) is will it be one of those projects they sit back and incorporate under the blight tax because they are now heavily invested in that … we just don’t know. We just wanted to do something with it,” said Freddie Patrick, the executive director of Eastside Concerned Citizens Inc. He said he has attempted to speak with the lot’s owners to no avail, saying he would be happy to work with them to create a space for the neighborhood under their supervision.

″(We’ve) tried to make sure the place was boarded up so there weren’t vagrants or criminal activity in the building … We just hope that the owner will do something that would be productive to the neighborhood,” he said.

Though some residents have wondered whether the city, which owns the former Starfish Cafe across the street from the lot, or the Savannah College of Art and Design, which houses its historic preservation wing a few blocks down the street, would have any interest in the lot, both entities said they have not attempted to purchase the property in the past, nor are they looking at it now.

Tony Jordan, who headed the organization AWOL (All Walks of Life) in Savannah before taking the organization to Atlanta, said AWOL worked to secure the property with plans to build what he described as an “incubator art space” for the neighborhood’s youth. He said the goal was to create a “space for change” that included a range of amenities, such as audio and video editing spaces, so area youth could hone their craft and develop workforce skills without having to leave the area like the generations before them.

″(The center) would have allowed AWOL to be a nonprofit and work with for-profits (organizations) so it was a private/public entity,” he said. “It would’ve been a fully community space.”

To Jordan, the lot’s current owners “didn’t seem warm″ to the idea of letting the property go. He said he offered to include them in the process of reinventing the property. Instead, he said their offers for the property were rejected and countered with much larger proposals.

“They were asking for the potential of what it could be,” he said.

Eventually, he and his organization moved on to other properties that could inhabit their goals in a similar fashion to the old theater to no luck, leading AWOL to eventually leave Savannah.

THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE

As it stands today, there are no plans for the site, with the current owner declining to make a comment on the lot’s future.

In terms of the future as a movie theater, the site holds the same fate as every other movie theater in Savannah of the 1950s and ’60s as no full-time movie theater sits within the downtown limits (the only two theaters are on the Southside). As Otis Johnson said, while it might be destined for demolition, there is always hope that something could be made of the space.

“I’ve seen miracles in this town happen before where there were structures that everybody said should be demolished and someone with some vision and deep pockets came and saved it.”

For now, the days of a sausage sandwich, mid-morning matinee of the latest John Wayne film and a safe, community space are gone, and one of the last vestiges of black entertainment in Savannah waits for an uncertain future along with the rest of its neighborhood.

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