#3: The Mansion on Forsyth Park
“To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Mansion on Forsyth Park
When I first took a good long hard look at The Mansion on Forsyth Park while I was walking my three Jack Russells across the street in what once was the parade grounds of Savannah’s most fabulous park, I got the same eerie feeling I’d experienced when I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables for one of my English classes while attending The Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD).
Now it’s important to add that at the time I was walking my doggies, I was also with a friend who had lived her entire life in Savannah and had shared with me the rather weighty information that just a few years before I arrived to attend SCAD this Mansion had long served as Savannah’s finest mortuary for nearly a half-century. As Hawthorne said so well in his famous tome, “Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body!” Indeed, like so many things from the past do.
Well, of course, the answer to Hawthorne’s question is: “No!” (Especially not in Savannah!)
Yet, the truth is The Mansion on Forsyth Park is now part of The Kessler Collection of fabulous hotels and partnered with Marriott International. I can testify truthfully that I have been to its wonderful restaurant several times and enjoyed myself thoroughly each time.
So, from my limited experience, I doubt any family curse follows this mansion around like a haunted spirit, despite being filled with a history of death that rides alongside like a hearse from a funeral home. It’s not likely that a ghost of an old spinster has been hanging around the place waiting to be redeemed by the addition of youth and love and wonderfully wordy prose by one of America’s greatest writers.
But first impressions often stick, and I’m stuck with mine about The Mansion on Forsyth Park!
This picturesque mansion was initially built as a single-family home in 1889 for the Lewis Kayton family. Alfred Eichberg, a popular Jewish architect from Savannah, designed the original house in the Romanesque Revival style; with one of the more noted elements of the interesting design being the curved gable that is oft-repeated around the top of the home. Most of the current building was added in the early 2000s during the construction of the popular hotel.
And, naturally, you can’t help but admire the two medieval towers that face Forsyth Park—I’ve featured only one of them in this en plein-air oil work. I’ve painted the mansion more than once, of course. No doubt I’ll do so again and again. As Hawthorne noted in his preface, the attempt was…“to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” You can’t help but love that idea.
Luba’s Mansion on Forsyth Park painting in progress.
