Pine Gardens provided up-to-date and affordable housing for defense workers at the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation (SSC) during World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared September 26, 1941, as Liberty Fleet Day, and noted that it was “a memorable day in the history of American shipbuilding—a memorable day in the emergency defense of the Nation.” From early 1942 until late 1945, SSC operated as one of eighteen Liberty ship manufacturers in the nation, building and launching 106 vessels (including 88 Liberty ships) and employing a total of 46,766 workers—as many as 15,000 at a time. Pine Gardens was the premier working-class neighborhood of its time in Savannah, featuring spacious individual lots in a cohesive but varied pattern. As the president of Savannah Shipyards stated in 1941, “Our idea is to build a village that will not only be a model for Savannah, but for the entire country.”
Five hundred relatively uniform single-family houses sit in the center of small rectangular lots with green lawns and mature shrubs and trees, with miscellaneous outbuildings in the rear. The four- or five-room layouts, originally serving unskilled and skilled laborers, represent styles commonly referred to as minimal traditional, American small house, war-era, or Victory Cottages. The leafy residential grid of streets and rear lanes also provide for a sympathetically designed single-story commercial center, the first of its kind as part of a planned community in the city, with ample parking as well as a fire station. Two churches and a neighborhood school were added in the 1950s.