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 Director of Museums and Preservation Initiatives, 1982 - 2006 Historic Charleston Foundation  magine yourself strolling along Broad Street in a city that many have called America's "best preserved," "most livable," "most beautiful" and "most historic." Traffic moves slowly behind tour buses.
A detour north toward King Street's commercial district reveals that 50-year-old locally owned businesses, such as Tidwell Art Gallery and Furchgott Studio, are moving to make room for a Pottery Barn, and 150-year-old Kerrison Jewelers is closing its doors. National chains - Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic - have replaced Kerrisons and Silvers Department Store. The lunch counter at Woolworths is now just an aisle in another national chain store. Reading the newspaper over coffee, one finds ads filled with house sales. Family houses are marketed as "the perfect pied a terre," just right for island property owners who wish to avoid the long drive back after dinner. Dark windows along Church Street, Tradd Street and East Bay attest to the growing number of absentee homeowners who are in residence only a few weeks a year. Missing are children, professionals walking to and from work, older Charlestonians who have lived here all their lives, and faces reflecting racial diversity. And to preservationists' horror, a profusion of dumpsters often presages more than out-of-date air-conditioning equipment among the contents. Too often historic woodwork and original plaster can be found among the debris. A drive over the old Ashley Bridge toward Savannah shows a landscape sprawling outward, and across the Cooper, traffic jams mark a landscape in which suburbs are now nearly continuous to Awendaw. Is Charleston at a crossroads? Are the small-town quality of the Charleston peninsula and the pleasure of shrimping in nearby marshes already gone or merely lessened by two decades of growth, soaring real estate value, and a national trend toward uniformity? Is there a way to preserve Charleston as a livable city - not just with empty houses downtown, but with an active population served by the adjacent necessities of life?
When Historic Charleston Foundation was founded in 1947, its board of architects, bankers, lawyers, artists and historians concerned itself with saving downtown buildings from destruction for the worst kind of replacements - an auto repair garage, a gas station, a modern auto-based motel, or a national chain department store. Hopeful signs of progress in historic and environmental preservation abound in Charleston and the surrounding areas, but are these too little, too late? The City: Mixed Preservation Results In 1939 Henry Philip Staats and his wife, Juliette Wiles Staats, of Connecticut discovered Charleston as the ideal place for a winter home. Purchasing the 1735 house at 59 Church Street, they completed a restoration begun a decade before by another family. They carefully inserted a kitchen in a small original space, and from it provided Charleston with some of its most splendid black-tie dinner parties for nearly five decades. Eschewing air conditioning so as to not disturb 18th century paneling, they began a family tradition of stewardship that continues today. In recent years, some owners have splendidly restored old downtown houses without major alteration and happily occupied them: 64 South Battery, 69 Church Street, 15 Legare Street and 82 Pitt Street are a handful of examples. Others, such as 94 Church Street and 141 Church Street, have carefully preserved historic features while adding well-designed additions. Some have gone way beyond precedent and through scholarly consultation created nationally significant restorations, such as those at the Miles Brewton House at 27 King Street, the Simmons-Edwards House at 14 Legare Street, and the Sword Gate House at 32 Legare Street. A few Charleston families have continued long traditions of family stewardship such as the Parkers at 128 Tradd Street, the Ravenels at 68 Broad Street, the deSaussures at 34 Meeting Street, the Sinklers at 39 Church Street, the Simons at 8 South Battery and the Simons-Wilson family at both 9 Limehouse Street and 90 Church Street.
In former days, when buildings were rehabilitated or renovated as residences, construction techniques were surprisingly sensitive. Old features might be left in place under new additions. In contrast, today's intrusive renovations are increasingly the rule for houses being snapped up by speculators and others. The desire for commercial stoves, over-sized bathtubs, and expanded great rooms are leading to destruction of the very features that make Charleston houses unique and important in a national and international context. So too, escalating real estate values have created increasingly empty neighborhoods. Young families with children are the exception, as are middle-class Charlestonians who have moved to go to the suburbs. King Street: Traditions in Crisis In the 1970s, Historic Charleston Foundation's Executive Director Frances Edmunds called King Street the "weak, sick spine" of the city. Yet despite the mall flight that was affecting all American cities at that time, King Street still had a healthy sprinkling of local businesses: two department stores, a bookstore, men's haberdashers, women's dress shops, and shoe stores renowned throughout the South. Some of these businesses have survived. Yet the demise of local department stores, bookstores and other long-time family businesses is disturbing. With high rents and a plethora of chain stores, King Street has been dubbed an outdoor mall, with stores unrelated to Charleston and its local flavor. New Construction: A Question of Scale? Many Charleston citizens have their own lists of buildings they love to hate. The preservation community argues for "quality new design" while some citizens urge "traditional architecture." Most agree, however, that too many new buildings in the city lack distinctive design, good materials, and scale or harmony with their historic neighbors. In the late 1970s, Historic Charleston Foundation pushed for an urban height ordinance, a guarantee that new buildings would remain in scale with their surroundings and not clutter the city's historic skyline. While certain mechanical variances could be accommodated, wholesale variances were not allowed. Requirements enacted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after recent hurricanes made variances necessary in certain areas of the city, but often these requests sought heights taller than necessary to meet FEMA's guidelines, resulting in new construction that is out of scale and a view of the city in which roof top utilities and new buildings now compete with church steeples. Gone is the harbor view where, other than the People's Building and Fort Sumter House, one could visualize coming to Charleston a century before with little imagination. New construction on city parcels adjacent to Waterfront Park received liberal variances; these new rooftops now block views from many historic buildings. In addition to scale problems, Charleston does not have many new buildings with design or materials that warrant special pride or significance. Majestic Square and the new Judicial Center are respectably designed and of quality materials, but have few peers. Many American cities boast new architecture that excites the imagination, and even smaller towns have sought the best in contemporary architecture - Columbus, Indiana, for example. Yet Charleston's new architecture has been labeled poor by national community development figures like Andres Duany. With the exception of the 1986 competition for the design of the South Carolina Aquarium, there have been few national-level design competitions in the city. Materials for new buildings in Charleston rarely equal those of earlier construction. Stucco on metal lath reigns as a predominant building material. Suburban Sprawl: End of the Rural Lowcountry Thirty years ago, James and Johns islands were rural, farming areas, as were Christ Church Parish in Charleston County and neighboring Berkeley and Dorchester counties. Farm fields and stands of longleaf pine predominated. African-Americans still held rural land in communities with lineage that dated to the Civil War. Live oaks and Spanish moss shaded less traveled roads. Development models compiled by the S.C. Coastal Conservation League show most rural land in the Tri-county area will be eliminated by 2020. While the Charleston 2000 plan has identified ideal anti-sprawl provisions for areas annexed in to the city, its principles have yet to be applied. The memory of permits for the development of James Island's last unspoiled tract still stings in the mind of preservationists and neighbors. In Mount Pleasant, a widened Highway 17 cannot accommodate traffic from subdivisions and shopping centers. Even in the Old Village, weak aesthetic controls have not prevented near demolition of historic buildings and the subdivision of Mount Pleasant's original lots into cramped parcels with overly large dwellings. In Berkeley County, industrial development threatens the sensitive Cooper River area. On the Ashley River, Middleton Place and Drayton Hall continue to be threatened from all sides by new subdivisions. A plan to guide developments sits outdated on a shelf, and property rights advocates in neighboring areas drown out those seeking regional planning. How can these issues be addressed? Better Direction through Preservation Historic Charleston Foundation has identified a number of steps that could alleviate some of the manifestations of these changes.
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| © 2012 Historic Charleston Foundation | 40 East Bay Street, Charleston, SC 29401 843-723-1623 |