City by the Sea

By Jack Bass

The only thing you need to know to understand Charleston is this: History is everything. It hangs here like moss from the oaks at White Point Gardens, where you can look out across the harbor at Fort Sumter. Almost a century and a half ago, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons opened fire on that fort, launching the Civil War. The war transformed Charleston from a rival of Boston as one of America’s wealthiest cities to what longtime Charleston resident Conrad Zimmerman describes as “a beautiful woman in a tattered dress.”

A century earlier, Charleston had paralleled its northern rival as a hotbed of rebellion against England. The city and nearby coastal parishes provided four signers of the Declaration of Independence and four of the Constitution. During its colonial period, begun in 1670 and influenced by John Locke, the city embraced the contradictory ideas of religious freedom and chattel slavery, both of which helped to create extraordinary wealth. But all that prosperity and prominence ended with the Civil War, and never really returned until twenty years ago.

Since then, as retired bishop David B. Thompson of the Catholic Diocese of Charleston put it recently, the city “has been living the life of Riley.” Thompson gave the invocation at the inauguration of the ninth term of Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., whom Governing magazine in a 1993 profile called “a living argument against term limits.” The magazine cited Riley’s “devotion to urban detail” as the key for making Charleston “feel like one of the world’s great cities” (though even polite Charlestonians won’t shy away from grousing about the city’s problems with parking, flooding, outrageous housing prices, and poor public schools). His mantra is simple: Focus on historic preservation and beautiful public places. That’s what brings a city together.

The idea for Charleston’s Waterfront Park came to Riley two decades ago during an early-morning trip along the thousand-foot strip of marsh and rotting docks that stretched south from the end of Vendue Range. There he saw an elderly black man on crutches who told him of his wonderful daily experience of coming there to see the sun rise over the water. Riley got a multi-million-dollar federal grant, and at the grand opening he had the man — by then in a wheelchair — seated and introduced as one of the dignitaries.

In the design for the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, a much-needed eight-lane connection over the Cooper River, Riley’s main mandate was that “it must be beautiful.” And it is. A constant stream of walkers and joggers traverse the spans daily, and first-timers stop at the top, stunned by views that stretch from downtown to the Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse.

Asked the one thing a visitor shouldn’t miss, Riley told me, “Walk in the historic district. The human scale, the rich texture of this city — there’s really no other place like it in America.”

Local Talk Few sum it up better than its writers, both native and those from “off.” Best-selling author Anne Rivers Siddons recalls the day that traffic in Atlanta “got too much for me and that’s the day we decided.” She and her husband settled into a home built in 1758, on Church Street, in the heart of the historic district. Of today’s Charleston Siddons says, “It’s magic. Hot as hell. Extremely beautiful. Go out and find a place overlooking the marsh and river at sunset and watch the sun go down over all those tidal creeks. I think it informs everything that Charleston is.”

People around town talk a lot about the way the land affects them emotionally. Writer Barbara Hagerty believes that what makes Charleston special “is the closeness of art and nature. You can be sitting at noon in Dock Street Theatre listening to opera during Spoleto and forty-five minutes later be on Edisto Island. Where else can you do that?”

Spoleto Festival USA, which opens its thirty-second season May 23, provides the annual cultural high point for Charleston. With casts of world-renowned performers, the eclectic festival keeps Charleston on the international arts map and, for seventeen days each year, energizes it with drama, music, dance, and art.

South Carolina’s poet laureate, Marjory Wentworth, says too many visitors miss the beaches, only fifteen minutes from downtown on Sullivan’s Island or Folly Beach, where you are free to walk as far as you want on a smooth sandy strand.

Dana Beach, the veteran executive director of the Coastal Conservation League, says one must explore Charleston’s “pre-colonial landscape of forests and rivers and marshes.” His favorites are the historic small communities of Rockville and Edisto Beach, south of the city, and McClellanville, almost forty miles north.

The Holy City Charleston is called the Holy City because of the abundance of church steeples — and some of the oldest places of worship in the South. From the second-floor porch (porches are called piazzas for reasons too complicated to explain) of my own home on Queen Street, I can look out at three historic churches — the Catholic cathedral for the statewide diocese of Charleston, the oldest Unitarian church in the South, and an adjacent eighteenth-century Lutheran church.

My keen-eyed neighbor Harriet Popham Rigney says a visitor should check out the tombstone in the Huguenot graveyard that always has flowers on it—“and on Sunday a glass of wine.” Among the old families of Charleston, most of whom have sold centuries-old family dwellings, she’s fascinated by the feuds that linger. For visitors “of standing,” she adds, “you should definitely go to the St. Cecilia Society Ball — but you can’t.” Admission to this holiest of holies is restricted to bloodlines of the color blue. One of the city’s great scandals occurred three-quarters of a century ago when an upstart newspaper dared to print a story about the ball. It is a matter not of secrecy, but of privacy. Those who go are those who know.

A Foot in the Past Charleston opened the nineteenth century with the largest Jewish population of any American city. Roughly half of South Carolina’s Jewish population currently lives in greater Charleston, which includes the oldest surviving Reform congregation in the world, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (Holy Congregation House of God) downtown on Hasell Street. Its Coming Street cemetery — the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in the South — includes graves of Confederate soldiers.

Although Jews owned slaves, they owned fewer than free persons of color, who in 1861 made up almost 8 percent of the city’s population. The Reverend Joseph Darby, pastor of Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, calls Charleston “a very diverse city, in some respects a very divided city in that there’re some folks who don’t know each other and don’t want to know each other.”

Class divisions remain. “One of the interesting things,” says Marvin Dulaney, a historian at the College of Charleston, “is the city has seemed to be in denial about its black history despite its being majority black for much of its history. But it’s beginning to change.” He cites the increasingly diverse college; the historic plantations that have begun to absorb their history as slave plantations; and plans to build the International African American Museum.

National Book Award-winning author and native New Yorker Ted Rosengarten left Harvard to study the Alabama Sharecroppers Union for what became his seminal work, All God’s Dangers. He remembers coming to McClellanville more than three decades ago. “I would say it’s the closest place to feeling I’ve stepped into an earlier time,” Rosengarten says.

Native son Robert Rosen, who makes his money as a lawyer but is also a historian, resides on Water Street, the southern terminus of the original walled city. He is struck by the “huge transition” he sees the city undergoing. “It used to be the place you could point to a house and call the name of the family that’s been there for generations. But half of these houses now are owned by people who don’t live here. It’s like a weekend retreat. The old Charlestonians have sold out,” he says. But, he adds, the people who’ve moved down here for the lifestyle serve on boards and contribute. “Overall, they’ve enhanced the city.”

Yet, some things in Charleston just don’t change. Take the view from the harbor, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers come together, natives whimsically proclaim, to form the Atlantic Ocean.

Take the ambiance South of Broad. “Stand on the corner of Meeting and Tradd,” says Alex Sanders, the great story-telling former judge and longtime College of Charleston president. “Look around three hundred and sixty degrees. It hasn’t changed in three hundred years.”

From the days when, as the old saying goes, the city “was too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash,” a few farsighted women led the battle that made Charleston a cradle of staunch historic preservation. Want to buy an old home and paint it? The Board of Architectural Review, established in 1931 and feared more than the IRS, better like your shade of color as well as any plans for external modification.

“We have to protect the reason people come here to visit,” says Cynthia Jenkins, executive director of the Preservation Society of Charleston. “But it’s not just the buildings. The character of the city is made up of the people.”