Satchel, which specializes in handcrafted bags and other accessories, moved recently from Broughton Street to 4 E. Liberty St. I’ll have more in an upcoming column about Satchel’s successful history and new location.
Satchel took the space last occupied by Savannah Comics, which merged with Comics and More on the Southside.
Before turning into Savannah Comics, the store was known as Home Run Video, which stocked an impressive and idiosyncratic collection of foreign and independent films.
Stores like Home Run Video and Captain Video were cultural hubs for downtown Savannah. Browsing for offbeat movies, strangers could become friends.
And then Netflix killed the video store.
The history is obviously more complicated than that, but new technologies and services proved stiff competition for the locally owned video stores in Savannah and other cities that many of us patronized for 20 years or so.
Pretty much every time I walk past 4 E. Liberty St., I think about movies I rented or conversations I had there.
Redbox does not inspire the same nostalgia.
The video store isn’t the only type of business that has disappeared from downtown Savannah over the last 20 years.
We have also seen the departure of downtown’s dive bars.
Sure, Pinkie Master’s Lounge is still kicking and still routinely gets added to lists of great dive bars in the South, but I don’t think Pinkie’s has fit the definition of a dive bar very well for years now.
The departure of dive bars was probably inevitable, as downtown property values rose, as tourism grew, as demographics changed.
Given today’s economy, it’s probably impossible to make a decent living in the downtown area with a small, unassuming, inexpensive bar that relies mostly on regular local customers.
Downtown has any number of appealing bars where I feel right at home even as a casual customer, but I wouldn’t use the word “dive” to describe any of them.
Like video stores, downtown’s dive bars were prime places to strike up casual conversation and to inject some unpredictability into otherwise programmed days and, especially, nights.
In downtown Savannah today, coffee shops fill some of those roles, but only to a degree.
If we want to see more diversity in terms of downtown businesses that cater primarily to local residents, we first need to think about getting more people living downtown.
Increasing the size of the downtown population is an achievable and worthy goal, but we sure aren’t doing much to prioritize that effort.
I’ll circle back around to some of these themes again soon. In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear from readers about types of businesses that they remember most fondly.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.