Mercer Williams House

Where it sits. Mercer House stands at 429 Bull Street on the western trust lot of Monterey Square, the southernmost of the six squares on Savannah's Bull Street axis and, for many, the most complete of them. The house is set back behind a low brick wall and iron railing, raised on a rusticated basement so that the main floor sits a full storey above the street. Its neighbours make the square: the Gothic Revival Temple Mickve Israel, seat of the third-oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, faces it from the eastern side, and the 1854 monument to Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry officer mortally wounded during the 1779 siege of Savannah, rises from the centre of the square beneath the oaks.

The story behind it. The New York architect John S. Norris, who worked in Savannah through the 1840s and 1850s and left the city several of its best buildings, designed the house for General Hugh Weedon Mercer, a West Point graduate and Confederate officer. Construction began in 1860, stopped during the Civil War with the shell only partly up, and was completed around 1868 under a new owner, John Wilder. No member of the Mercer family ever lived in it, a fact that survives poorly against a century of storytelling. What the family did contribute was a descendant: the songwriter Johnny Mercer was Hugh Mercer's great-grandson. The building itself is a confident piece of Italianate design in red brick with brownstone trim, arched openings, heavy bracketed cornices and delicate cast-iron side balconies, arranged around a central hall with a garden and carriage house behind. It served for decades as an apartment building and by the 1960s was in poor repair.

Jim Williams. The antiques dealer and restorationist Jim Williams bought the house in 1969 and spent two years bringing it back, filling it with English and Continental furniture, Chinese export porcelain, portraits and a Faberge collection. It was one of more than fifty Savannah properties he restored, and his annual Christmas party there was the social fixture of the city's season. On 2 May 1981 Williams shot and killed Danny Hansford, a young man who worked for him, in the ground-floor study. He said it was self-defence. The state tried him four times across the following eight years — an almost unheard-of sequence in American law, driven by mistrials and successful appeals — and the fourth trial, moved to Augusta in 1989, ended in acquittal. Williams died of heart failure in the house on 14 January 1990, some months later, in a room close to where Hansford had died.

On screen and on the page. John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, published in 1994, made the house internationally known, and Clint Eastwood filmed his adaptation in Savannah in 1997 with Kevin Spacey as Williams and John Cusack as the visiting journalist. The exterior of Mercer House on Monterey Square appears throughout the film, and the square's oaks and the Pulaski monument frame several sequences. The interiors, however, were not shot inside the real house: the family declined interior filming, and the production recreated the rooms elsewhere. Anyone comparing a tour of the actual ground floor with the film will find the layout and the furnishings deliberately different.

What you actually see today. The house remained in the family after Williams's death and is owned by his sister, Dorothy Kingery, who opened it to the public in 2004 as the Mercer Williams House Museum. Guided tours of about half an hour cover the main floor only — the entrance hall, the double drawing rooms, the dining room and the study — while the family continues to live upstairs, so photography inside is not permitted. The collection is essentially the one Williams assembled: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture, a Regency dining suite, Chinese porcelain, and a portrait wall. Guides discuss the architecture and the collection at length and the killing rather briefly, which surprises visitors who arrive with the book in hand. The carriage house at the rear, reached from Wayne Street, holds a shop selling books, prints and reproduction pieces, and can be visited without taking the tour.

Getting there and timing. Monterey Square is a fifteen-minute walk south along Bull Street from the centre of the historic district, passing Chippewa and Madison squares on the way, and five minutes north of Forsyth Park. Tours run several times daily with a break in the early afternoon and are ticketed at the carriage house; the last tour is in the late afternoon and the house closes on some public holidays. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons, and the square is at its best in late March when the azaleas come out beneath the oaks. Access is limited: a flight of stone steps leads up to the front door, and there is no lift to the main floor.