AS A project to build an enormous underground parking garage in a quiet residential neighborhood overlooking Forsyth Park gains momentum, it’s worth taking a look at the City’s other underground garage – the huge Whitaker Street Garage underneath Ellis Square.

Read our previous coverage of the controversial Forsyth Commons office/garage project here and here.

At over 400 projected parking spaces, the proposed Forsyth Park garage would be about half the volume of the existing City-run Whitaker Street Garage, which is designed to have over 1000 spaces.

But the Forsyth Park garage will be at least three stories underground, in a much more sensitive flood zone than the Whitaker Street Garage.

And like the Whitaker facility, the Forsyth garage will be essentially a City property – part of the planned public/private partnership which has so far enabled Forsyth Commons to escape much of the routine regulatory oversight every other project in Savannah is subject to.

I recently took a walking tour of the Whitaker Garage, which is currently showing many signs of structural stress and repeated flooding.

One can reasonably conclude that whatever state of disrepair the Whitaker Garage is currently in will be replicated in the similar City-operated underground garage planned for Forsyth Park – a fabled greenspace often called Savannah's crown jewel.

And the current state of the Whitaker Street Garage, as you will see in the following photos, is not encouraging at all, from both a safety and a design standpoint.

Here are some key photos and impressions of my journey. All the following photos were taken in public areas:

The Whitaker Street Parking Garage was completed in 2009, roughly concurrent with the redesign of Ellis Square.

The public stairs down to the lower levels of the garage are rotten from water damage due to constant rain and moisture incursion.

Closeup of the public stairs -- some steps have rusted completely through.

Huge underground areas of the Whitaker Street Garage are off-limits due to extensive maintenance.

These are examples of injection points seen throughout the Whitaker Street Garage, where structural issues are addressed by literally injecting epoxy-type compounds into the existing stressed concrete. The Whitaker Garage has many thousands of these.

An example of the extreme water incursion at almost all lower levels of the Whitaker Street Garage.

Another example of massive underground water intrusion. This is not unusual in the Whitaker Street Garage.

Note the open fissure between floors. You can stick your finger through that rusted out crack.

Overhead stress fissure.

A typical long, massive stress crack overhead, in one of the lower levels.

Another enormous stress crack.

Destroyed segment of crumbling concrete due to stress fracture and water incursion.

This gaping hole in the concrete ceiling -- which keep in mind is also the floor of the parking level above -- is at least seven inches deep.

Another huge hole in the concrete -- at least two inches.

All along the floors of the Whitaker Street Garage you see fill-in repairs of long cracks in the concrete, like this one.

You see these meters frequently in the Whitaker Street Garage -- measuring the amount of widening of a particular stress fissure in the concrete. All of these areas pictured are publicly viewable and NOT in restricted areas.

Another long stress crack repair -- this is not an atypical length for one of these cracks.

A key support pillar underground with dozens of injected repair points. What does this tell us about structural integrity of the underground parking levels?

Here an entire portion of wall had to be shored up with many injection repair points.

This is a couple of inches of standing water in one stairwell leading to a parking level underground. At the time this photo was taken, there was no recent rain in Savannah. The most recent heavy shower had been weeks before.

The bottom floor of the Whitaker Street Garage is such a heavy flooding risk that the City had to post this disclaimer. What happens is you get stuck down there during a heavy rain event, and you need to get out using rusted-out stairs with holes in them?

Every underground garage needs enormous ventilation fans to bring in air from above to refresh stale/polluted air in the garage. Here are the fans under the southwest corner of the Whitaker Street Garage -- uncleaned and full of debris.

This is ELEVEN INCHES of standing water in the basin under the southwest corner of Ellis Square, directly on the other side of the ventilation fan in the previous photo. Again, there had been no recent rain in Savannah when this photo was taken. This basin water was weeks old at a minimum.

A view of the same basin with almost a foot of standing water, weeks after any significant rain event.

Underground garage ventilation fans require maintenance and produce a significant amount of high-decibel noise. Here are some more aged-looking fans under the Whitaker Street Garage.

The ventilation fans in the Whitaker Street Garage reach ear-splitting decibel levels. A reading above 90db, like the fan pictured here, is the equivalent of being next to a passing freight train or a revving Harley Davidson. Continued exposure to this noise level can cause permanent hearing damage. This kind of decibel level is so loud it can be heard aboveground.

This fan registers 95.3db.

This fan registers an incredible 106.6db -- equivalent to a jet airliner passing a thousand feet over your head. It is literally impossible not to be able to hear this at ground level above.

Even aboveground the Whitaker Street Garage reaches over 85db -- equivalent to a loud food blender. This would be heard 24 hours a day in the neighborhood next to Forsyth Park, and clearly audible from the Park itself.

As further testament to the City of Savannah's poor track record of responsible maintenance of underground parking garages -- here's a City of Savannah vehicle covered with a layer of dust so thick someone scrawled graffiti in it.

And finally, here's another City of Savannah car, belonging to the taxpayers -- encased in dust and defaced with graffiti.

Again, I want to stress that all these photos were taken in publicly accessible portions of the Whitaker Street Garage. Literally anyone else could walk around, view, and photograph the same scenes as I did.

So the questions ask themselves:

Has the City of Savannah has done a good enough job with the underground parking garage it already owns and operates to be trusted with oversight of another one?

One in a much more sensitive flood zone, and in a much more settled residential area next to Savannah's most scenic greenspace?

Decide for yourself.