Chippewa Square (Savannah, Georgia)

Where it sits. Chippewa Square is the fourth of the six squares strung along Bull Street, the spine that runs south from Savannah's City Hall and the Savannah River through the heart of the historic district. It sits between Perry and Hull streets, one block north of Madison Square and one block south of Wright Square, and its live oaks are old enough that the canopy closes overhead in summer and the Spanish moss hangs low enough to brush a tall pedestrian. Traffic on Bull Street splits around the square rather than through it, which is the essential trick of James Oglethorpe's 1733 town plan: each square is a room, not a roundabout, and the ward around it holds four residential trust lots and four tything blocks.

The story behind it. The square was laid out in 1815, one of the later additions to Oglethorpe's grid, and named for the Battle of Chippawa, fought on 5 July 1814 near Niagara Falls during the War of 1812. At its centre stands the bronze figure of James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, sculpted by Daniel Chester French — the man who would later carve the seated Lincoln in Washington — on a granite pedestal designed by Henry Bacon, the Lincoln Memorial's architect. It was unveiled in 1910. Oglethorpe is shown in the uniform of a British general, sword drawn, and he faces south, toward Spanish Florida and the threat that shaped the colony's founding. Four lions at the base of the pedestal hold the arms of Georgia and of the Oglethorpe family. The surrounding buildings are an unusually good cross-section of Savannah's architectural centuries: the Savannah Theatre on the eastern side, first opened in 1818 to a design by William Jay and rebuilt after fires, with a streamlined 1940s marquee; the First Baptist Church of 1833 on the western side, the oldest standing church building in the city; and the Philbrick-Eastman House on the northwest trust lot.

On screen. Chippewa Square is where Forrest Gump waits for a bus. Robert Zemeckis shot the framing sequence of the 1994 film here in the autumn of 1993, and the square consequently appears more than any other Savannah location in the picture. The falling white feather that opens the film drifts down over the historic district, past the steeple of the Independent Presbyterian Church at Bull and Oglethorpe two blocks north, and settles at Tom Hanks's feet on the square's northern side. The bench scenes that punctuate the whole narrative — the box of chocolates, the arriving and departing strangers, the final walk to the bus — were all filmed at that spot, on the sidewalk at the north end of the square where the bus stop was staged.

The bench is not there, and never was. This is the single most useful thing to know before visiting. The bench Forrest sits on was a prop, moulded in fibreglass and painted to look like weathered timber, placed on the sidewalk for the shoot and taken away when the crew wrapped. No permanent bench ever stood at that spot, and the benches now in the square are ordinary municipal furniture. The film prop survives and is on public display in the Savannah History Museum at 303 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, inside the old Central of Georgia railway shed, where it sits behind a rope with a card explaining its provenance. Visitors who arrive expecting to sit where Hanks sat should walk the ten minutes west to the museum; those who want the shot itself should stand at the square's northern edge looking south toward the Oglethorpe monument, which is the direction the camera faced.

What you actually see today. The square is a paved and planted rectangle roughly 200 feet across, with diagonal walks converging on the monument, cast-iron benches, azalea beds and a ring of live oaks underplanted with ferns. It is genuinely used — students from the Savannah College of Art and Design cut across it all day, wedding parties queue for photographs beneath the moss, and the Savannah Theatre still stages a nightly revue. Horse-drawn tour carriages pass at walking pace on the hour. Neighbouring Bull Street holds independent bookshops, the Six Pence Pub and a run of nineteenth-century townhouses with high stoops and ironwork.

Getting there and timing. Savannah's historic district is compact and flat, and Chippewa Square is roughly a fifteen-minute walk from River Street or from Forsyth Park at the southern end of Bull. The free downtown shuttle stops nearby. There is no admission and the square is open at all hours; early morning gives the softest light through the oaks and the fewest people, while late afternoon backlights the moss. March and April bring azaleas and comfortable temperatures; July and August are humid and thunderous. Paved walks and dropped kerbs make the square straightforward for wheelchairs, though Savannah's older brick sidewalks nearby are uneven.