Sweet Savannah

The Starland District has become a magnet for the city’s creative crowd. Adam Erace sizes up its funky boutiques and cool bars.

IT'S AN UNNERVING MOMENT for anyone: the first time you realize that you're the oldest person in the room.

For me, it happened in Savannah's Starland District, an energetic neighborhood of boutiques and restaurants south of the city's historic center. I was at Moodright's, a country uncle's roadhouse with the soul of Chuck E. Cheese plastered with kooky taxidermy and beer-branded neon. The lounge trades in neo-trashy cocktails and retro amusements such as duckpin bowling; when I visited it was bingo night, so I grabbed a card and wedged myself into a crush of students from the Savannah College of Art & Design.

"I always thought tonic had no calories, like club soda," lamented one. "I felt like Regina George eating Kalteen Bars," she added, referring to a famous prank from Mean Girls. She ended up hitting bingo first.

Savannah is a multiverse, a city that's at once reverential of the past (19th-century graveyards, horsedrawn carriages) and obsessed with the future (pop-up restaurants, conceptual galleries). In recent years, Starland has emerged as a playground for a younger, edgier scene, fueled by students from the bohemian art school. In fact, the district, which is about one mile square, got its start when two SCAD grads and a third partner bought the defunct Starland Dairy in 1999 and turned it into artists' studios.