Ask John Duncan what his favorite building in Savannah is and he will not say the Mercer Williams House. That alone should tell you something.
Duncan has been walking people around this city’s squares and side streets for going on fifteen years, and the tours he runs — small groups, two hours on foot, no microphone, no bus — have developed a reputation among a specific kind of visitor: the ones who already know the cathedral is beautiful and want to know why the brickwork on that particular carriage house on Charlton Street looks slightly wrong for its supposed date. Those people find Duncan eventually, usually through word of mouth, occasionally through a mention in an architecture school newsletter.
He spent his earlier career as a preservation consultant, which means he has actually been inside buildings most tour operators only gesture at from the sidewalk. He knows which mid-nineteenth century rowhouses still have their original plaster medallions, and he knows which ones had them installed in 1987 to satisfy a buyer who wanted “period character.” He is not unkind about it. He’s just precise.
A standard tour runs about $35 per person, though the price scales depending on group size and what you’re after. He books through a simple website and responds to emails faster than you’d expect. Groups max out around eight people. He has turned down larger groups, which is either a business decision he’ll someday regret or a point of genuine principle — probably both.
The tours themselves cover the landmark squares in the Victorian District and the Historic District, but the route shifts based on what he thinks the group can handle. Families with kids who are visibly melting in August heat get a tighter loop. Architecture students from SCAD, who book him more often than you’d think, get the full version, including a detour past a Federal-style warehouse on Bay Street extension that most people walk right past because it’s flanked by louder buildings and doesn’t announce itself.
The dry humor emerges in layers. He will describe a particularly aggressive restoration from the 1970s as having been completed “with great enthusiasm and uneven results.” He will note that a certain millionaire’s Italianate mansion “was built to impress, and continues to do that, whatever else you might say about it.” He doesn’t editorialize often, but when he does, it lands.
What he won’t do is perform. There are no ghost stories. No anecdotes that may or may not be true about famous people who may or may not have slept somewhere. He has been asked, more than once, to add some of that. He has declined, more than once. If you want that, Savannah has many excellent options. He is not one of them.
Morning tours are better in summer, for obvious reasons. Spring is the best time full stop — the light in the squares in March and April is genuinely absurd, and he’ll tell you exactly why the canopy spacing works the way it does, which is more interesting than it sounds. Wear shoes you’ve already broken in. Cobblestones are not forgiving to optimism.
Duncan isn’t famous, and he probably won’t be. But if you care about buildings — really care, not just aesthetically — an afternoon with him is probably the most useful two hours you’ll spend in this city.
