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Charleston Travel Articles
- Charleston Preserved
- Lowcountry Cuisine
It's easy to think Charleston is a neverland, sweetly arrested in pastel perfection. But look at Civil War-era images of the Battery mansions on East Bay Street, one of the most photographed areas in town today, and you see the surrounding homes disfigured with crippling battle scars. Because of the poverty that followed the Civil War, on the whole locals simply couldn't afford to build anew from the late 1860s through the latter part of the 20th century, so they put the homes they had back together.
In the 1920s it was community activism that rescued the old homes from being destroyed. According to Jonathan Poston, author of Buildings of Charleston, the preservation movement began when an Esso gas station was slated to take the place of the Joseph Manigault House. Citizens formed the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings (the first such group in the nation) and saved what's now a popular house museum. By 1931 Charleston's City Council had created the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), and designated the historic district protected from unrestrained development -- two more national firsts. The Historic Charleston Foundation was established in 1947, and preservation is now second nature (by law).
As you explore, look for Charleston single houses: just one room wide, these houses were built with the narrow end streetside and multistory south or southwestern porches (often called piazzas) to catch prevailing breezes. Cool air drifts across these shaded porches, entering houses through open windows. Look at the northern wall of a single house (the wall that faces a neighbor's garden and piazza), and you see few windows original to the structure. That's a tipping of the hat to privacy, a little urban built-in gentility.
You'll see numerous architectural vestiges along Charleston's preserved streets. Many houses have plaques detailing their history, and others have Carolopolis Awards given for fine restoration work. Old fire-insurance plaques are more rare; they denote the company that insured the home and that would extinguish the flames if a fire broke out. Notice the bolt heads and washers that dot house facades along the Battery; some are in the shape of circles or stars, and others are capped with lion heads. These could straighten sagging houses when tightened via a crank under the floorboards.
The streetside slabs of marble or stone are horse mounts, and boot scrapes are set in the sidewalk beside the front doors of many homes. Note the iron spikes that line the tops of some residential gates, doors, walls, and windows. Serving the same purpose as razor wire atop prison fences, most of these cheveux de frise (French for frizzy hair) were added after a thwarted 1822 slave rebellion, to deter break-in -- or escape.
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