“There's a cat that lives on the cobblestones near Huey's, and every tourist tries to pet it, and it lets exactly no one.”

The Uber drops you on Bay Street because the driver won't attempt the cobblestone ramp down to the river. Fair enough — the stones are the originals, ballast from eighteenth-century merchant ships, and they'll rattle the fillings out of your teeth. You walk down the steep grade with your bag bouncing behind you, past a guy selling sweetgrass roses for five dollars and a shop that appears to sell nothing but hot sauce. The Savannah River is right there, wide and brown and indifferent, and a container ship the size of a city block is sliding past so close you could almost read the crew's t-shirts. The air is warm and heavy and smells like river mud and roasting sugar from the praline shops that line the lower level. This is River Street, and it has never once pretended to be elegant.

The JW Marriott Savannah sits at the western end of this stretch, which is the quieter end — past the tourist bars, past the candy stores, past the point where most visitors turn around. The building is the old Savannah Electric Power Company plant, and you know this because they've kept the smokestacks. Two of them, tall and brick-red, rising above the riverfront like a pair of exclamation points. The whole development is called Plant Riverside District, and it sprawls across several connected structures: restaurants, bars, a rooftop pool, event spaces, a museum about the building's industrial past. It is, by Savannah standards, enormous. The lobby alone could host a moderate wedding.

Sleeping inside a power plant

The rooms face either the river or the city, and you want the river. Not because the city view is bad — Savannah's skyline is all steeples and live oaks — but because waking up to a tugboat pushing a barge at six in the morning is a thing you didn't know you needed. The windows are floor-to-ceiling and the light comes in gray-blue before the sun clears the far bank. The bed is a Marriott bed, which means you already know what it feels like: firm, white, reliable. The bathroom has a walk-in shower with good pressure and a glass wall that faces the bedroom, which is a design choice that assumes a certain comfort level with whoever you're traveling with.

What's strange is how much there is to do without leaving the property. There's a rooftop bar called the Electric Moon Skydeck that gets genuinely packed on weekend nights — not with hotel guests, but with locals. A DJ plays. People dance. It's the kind of scene that makes you forget you're standing on top of a Marriott. Downstairs, there are something like eight or nine food and drink options spread across the complex, which is both impressive and slightly disorienting. I ate shrimp and grits at Moss & Oak and they were good — not the best in Savannah, but solid, with a proper stone-ground texture and enough heat in the gravy. The best shrimp and grits in Savannah are at The Grey, on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, about a twelve-minute walk away, but you'll need a reservation made roughly when your grandparents were young.

The honest thing about this place is that it's big. Really big. The hallways are long. The elevator banks serve different towers. I walked to the wrong building twice looking for the pool and ended up in a conference center that smelled like fresh carpet. There's a map at the front desk and I'd suggest taking a photo of it on your phone. The scale is the trade-off for having everything under one roof — you get convenience, but you lose the intimacy that Savannah's smaller inns do so well. If you want creaky floors and a host who knows your name, this isn't that. If you want a riverfront pool and a cocktail bar and someone else to figure out parking, this is exactly that.

“The container ships pass so close to River Street that you can hear the engine hum in your chest, and every single person on the sidewalk stops to watch.”

The location earns its keep in the morning. Walk east along River Street before the shops open and you have the cobblestones mostly to yourself. The old cotton warehouses are stacked up the bluff like geological layers, connected by iron bridges and steep stone stairs. Climb any set of stairs and you're on Bay Street, which leads to the squares — Savannah's famous grid of pocket parks shaded by live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Forsyth Park is about a twenty-minute walk south, or you can grab one of the free DOT shuttles that loop through the Historic District. They run every fifteen minutes or so, and the drivers are unfailingly chatty.

One detail with absolutely no practical value: the hotel has installed an enormous collection of quirky art and artifacts throughout the public spaces. There's a vintage jukebox. There are old factory gears mounted on walls. There is, unless I hallucinated it, a full-sized replica of a ship's wheel near the lobby bar. It's a lot. It's the kind of maximalist decorating that either delights you or exhausts you, and I found myself somewhere in between — charmed by a neon sign, bewildered by a taxidermied something-or-other, and then suddenly needing to sit down.

Walking out into the morning

You leave the way you came, back up the cobblestone ramp, bag rattling. But the street looks different now. The praline shops are just opening, and someone is hosing down the sidewalk outside Wet Willie's, and the river has turned gold in the early light. A woman on a bench is eating a biscuit from Clary's — the paper bag unmistakable — and the sweetgrass rose guy is already set up, arranging his work on a folding table. The cat near Huey's is sitting on a bollard, watching the water. You know better than to try to pet it.

Rooms at the JW Marriott Savannah start around $250 on weeknights and climb steeply on weekends and during Savannah's many festival seasons — St. Patrick's Day in March will cost you roughly double. What that buys you is the river, the rooftop, the smokestacks, and a base camp at the edge of one of the most walkable historic districts in the American South.