A new joint venture formed by longtime Savannah businessman John Cay, Batson Cook Development Company and CSX Realty Development is in the preliminary stages of developing a master business plan for a mixed use development on 56 acres of land on Hutchinson Island.
CSX Realty, a division of CSX Corp., owns the property.
The joint venture will be known as Savannah Harbor Associates LLC.
“Savannah Harbor is one of the best opportunities for the continued development of the world-class port city of Savannah,” said Cay, the former president and CEO of Palmer & Cay, one of the largest privately held insurance brokerage firms in the nation.
He retired from the firm this year and was subsequently approached by CSX management to help formulate a plan for its holdings on Hutchinson.
Cay, a Savannah native with more than 40 years of leadership experience, recruited Atlanta-based Batson Cook, which has developed such area projects as NewsPlace in downtown Savannah and Belfair Town Village across the river in Bluffton.
The 56 acres are split into three undeveloped parcels, said E. Ray Michaels Jr., senior vice president of acquisitions and finance for Batson Cook.
“Parcel 5 is about 27 acres fronting the river, Parcel 6 has 12 acres adjacent to the Westin Spa and Parcel 9 consists of 17 acres next to the golf course,” Michaels said Friday, stressing that the project is still in the early stages of development.
“We have done our due diligence and hope to have our market studies complete by the end of the year,” he said. “At that point, we will begin to put together our master plan.
“Right now, all three parcels are blank slates.”
Savannah Harbor Associates will also work with Toll Brothers, the luxury homebuilder that has acquired The Reserve, a partially developed residential neighborhood on the island, to make sure their plans complement one another, Michaels said.
“And we’re looking at SEDA’s World Trade Center building as a possible anchor for a small, Class A office park.”
Long time coming
A plan for transforming the island into a mixed-use, urban extension of Savannah has long been in the works.
For nearly 30 years, John McClesky — the name most associated with the renaissance of Hutchinson — focused a keen developer’s eye on the property. His was the vision that began transforming the largely overlooked island in the middle of the Savannah River from dense, wooded areas punctuated by an occasional industrial site to the golf and resort destination now known as Savannah Harbor.
Today, thanks to McClesky’s efforts, the island is home to the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center, the Westin Savannah Harbor Golf Resort and Spa, the Savannah Economic Development Authority and the World Trade Center Savannah.
Despite all this, it’s a transformation that’s still far from the now-retired developer’s vision of turning the island into a thriving community with shops, restaurants, a marina and private homes.
“The downturn certainly did some damage,” McClesky said in a 2010 interview. “Before that, things were moving along, with SEDA finishing their office building and plans in the works for a marina next to the Westin.”
Savannah Harbor Associates plans to build on McClesky’s vision and has recruited him to serve in an advisory capacity to the project.
“The Savannah MSA is a high growth market,” Michaels said. “It has a robust and diversified economy built on a foundation of a very strong logistics system, as well as strong manufacturing, aerospace and tourism industries.”
Savannah’s logistics includes the nation’s fourth busiest container port, which is connected by rail to the entire Eastern Seaboard.
ON THE WEB
For more information on Batson Cook Development Co., go to www.batsoncookdev.com.
Hutchinson has enjoyed storied past
Over the past three centuries, the island Gen. James Oglethorpe named for his friend and fellow Englishman Archibald Hutchinson has been home to livestock, slaves, indentured servants, rice plantations, sailors, soldiers and a variety of heavy industry.
In early days, it was notorious as a favorite, out-of-the-way dueling ground for hot-headed colonists, just part of the violence visited upon the island. In fact, the first people hanged in the new colony were sentenced to death for a murder committed on Hutchinson.
Fellow Irish servants and lovers Alice Riley and Richard White were hanged in 1735 for killing William Wise, the island landowner to whom they had been indentured.
Originally designated by Oglethorpe to pasture the Trustees’ cattle, the island was critical to the colonists’ survival in the new world. Essential crops, including rice, would quickly become part of its early connection to Savannah.
Some time before the Revolutionary War, colonists built Fort Augusta on the eastern tip of the island, but it quickly fell to ruins in the island’s boggy soil.
Still, the beauty of Hutchinson was such that, in 1755, the notoriously greedy Royal Governor John Reynolds seized ownership of the island for his personal use, which contributed to his being recalled and replaced a year later.
From the 1760s until after the Civil War, the island was home to hundreds of slaves who labored on the rice plantations. Two of the largest operations were Rae’s Hall and Royal Vale, both of which eventually fell victim to the ravages of hurricanes that flooded the island.
For the next century or so, Hutchinson was mostly abandoned, with the exception of shipping wharves, some maritime industry and a few saw mills. Mostly, the island was known as a dumping ground, its overgrown marshes and thickets often concealing the corpses of murder victims.
In February 1993, the body of Dorothy Brown was found under a mattress in a trash heap on the island. Her husband, Kenneth O. Brown, was convicted of her murder two years later. In 1994, the body of Tami Jackson, 17, was found stabbed 130 times, bound and run over by a car. Her killer was never found.
The lack of major development was complicated during much of the 20th century by confusion over whether Hutchinson belonged to Georgia or South Carolina. Georgia came out the winner about the same time developer John McClesky discovered the island, setting in motion development plans that are ongoing today.