July 2018

146 147 tion equipment. Savannah is also one of the fastest growing ports in the country; container shipping, there, is setting yearly records for the amount of cargo tonnage coming and going. Today, the most significant growth is happening in the outlying areas such as Pooler, a city right next to Savannah, as well as Effingham County to the west of that. Bryan County, to the south, is also experienc- ing an extremely fast rate of growth.With Savan- nah’s Historic District near full restoration, the City has now set its sights on the eastern and western edges of downtown as its primary areas of focus for redevelopment opportunities. Amajor, ongoing project is the construction of a newArena and the development of the surrounding Canal District on Savannah’s west side.This is one of the largest projects to ever be undertaken by the City of Savannah,and the newArena site presents the op- portunity to redevelop a large andmostlyabandoned industrial tract to thewest ofWest BoundaryStreet, just a half-mile from theHistoricDistrict,creating a vibrant newcenter of activity in Savannah’s core. “This is primarily an underutilized industrial area,” THE SAVANNAH ARENA (SAVANNAH, GA) says Pete Shonka,Director of the Office of Arena Development,“which is due to the fact that we are looking at an areawhere it is very lowlying.And so, any redevelopment has some challenges with it.There are the environmental issues and certainly lots of floodplain issues.Over the last 15 years,the cityhas bought up a lot of property in blocks,as part of this Arena plan,and a lot of it we are going to redevelop as a park that will be adjacent to the Arena site.” Part of the adjacent property is currently being used as a public works operation yard.“A part of that site is also an 1892 waterworks building,” adds Shonka.“It is this beautiful red brick and terracotta building with all sorts of incredible architectural detail on it. It was originally built as a building to house a boiler and a pump for our water system, but it is just this gorgeous building-almost like a Gothic style church in a lot of respects.And so we are going to re-purpose that and use that for small- er event venues and break out meeting space, along with the Arena.” In addition to the Arena construction, itself, there is infrastructure that has to be taken care of.This includes water and sewer work, as well as the