The Pirates House
The Pirates House is a restaurant that was founded on 20 E. Broadstreet. It was orignally made out of nine buildings and used to be an open ground until 1953 when only two of the houses were connected, thanks to Mr. Trauf who at the time used the building for the restaurant. On our first trip there it was in a peculiar and somewhat scary neighborhood that I would not want to be around at night. When first looking for an area to study. Halle saw the Pirates House and became very interested because it reminded her of home due to both being in such tropical areas (So why she had second thoughts on the area being spooky is something i’ll never know). Personally I didn’t care where we went but since the place had “pirate” in the title I was automatically “hooked”. Puns aside, When we finally got the chance to actually go inside we were highly curious on the wooding and the rest of the structure. Why did a part of the resturaunt look old compared to the other side and it was still able to keep itself together? Well, we definitely knew one part had to be fixed though, the cieling, after a little incident in 2007 because of people going up the stairs when told not to and basically falling though the ceiling. So thankfully some were kept pretty well though other parts had to be renevated.
Thanks to Pam, one of the workers at the Pirates House she was able to fill us in with more information. Apparently she’s been visting the resturaunt ever since she was five and in her time she’s studied more on its history. She told us that the Pirate’s House was orignally a boarding house known as the Sea Fair Inn back in 1752 and not only that but when is was an inn it was right by the restaurant was what used to be Fort Wayne but is now the Morris Center. The cut out doors on the walls of the restaurant were originally used for getting food up to the residents, while they used the open fireplace to cook the food and the floors were even dirt floors until 1972. Sadly, the boarding house wasn’t successful because Savannah was still settling in at the time. The licks of the boarding house later became taverns where people smuggled items, goods, and even ensalved people through the tunnels that would be sealed of in 1998. The Pirate’s House would also become a museum until World War 1 though afterwards it reopened once again after the war.
The Pirates house is also the oldest building in all of Savannah Georgia and can hold up to 600 guests all together. For the restaurant of the nine buildings, six were demolished in its time. The Pirates House was also fortunate enough to be graced with many celebraties coming in for dinner such as Ben Affleck, Gwenis Paltro, Burt Reynolds, Laura Hutton, Francis Coppola, and Johny Musso which we would never think of being true until someone named Earl told us, who has been in the pirate house for almost 40 years. We even got part of a story where one day Earl got a call asking for reservations in fifteen minutes and of course he could not do such a thing but then the gentleman on the phone said he was Ben Affleck and he could not believe it. But then he walks in with a couple other gentlemen and Gwenis Paltro and he could not believe his eyes. From then on many other celebrities have come along such as the ones mentioned earlier.
Mr. Trauf, the original owner, passed away on November 2006, but soon afterwards a man named Bob Turner who is a local of Savannah, Georgia became the new sole owner of the restaurant which the Pirates House is considered to be world famous.
