Posted on Sun, Apr. 20, 2008
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South Carolina's crown jewel
Charleston breathes history
By BOB DOWNING
AKRON BEACON JOURNAL
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CHARLESTON, S.C. --
This is a city known for its Southern beauty, charm, culture and hospitality.It's also known for its history, forts, beautiful gardens and plantations. Charleston is famous for its restaurants, Low Country cooking, pastel-colored row houses, moss-draped trees, upscale shopping, galleries and antique shops.
The city's open-air downtown flea market is popular. Gullah women, many of them descendants of slaves, make and sell dried sweetgrass baskets everywhere.
Laid-back but sophisticated, Charleston is a tourist favorite. It was the third most-visited city in the United States, behind only New York and San Francisco, in a 2007 survey of Conde Nast Traveler magazine.
The city gets 4 million visitors a year, mostly in the fall, winter and spring. Tourism is Charleston's No. 1 industry, a $3 billion annual affair.
But Charleston is most famed for its aristocratic and elegant historic structures with their piazzas (porches), stately columns and cobblestone streets. Just don't ask how many there are.
South Carolina has lots of history and Charleston, founded in 1670, is at the epicenter. It was once among the wealthiest cities in the nation.
The state has 1,300 National Register of Historic Places sites, including 160 districts. Charleston County has 184 National Register sites and 14 multi-building districts.
Charleston has an estimated 3,500 structures built before the Civil War.
Charleston records from 1944, 1974 and 1997 listed between 1,100 and 2,800 historic structures.
Charleston's Old and Historic District was added to the National Register in 1966. It claimed 650 buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries on the original 250 acres. The area now covers 770 acres and may have 4,800 historic buildings, says the Historic Charleston Foundation.
That number "sounds reasonable," said Robert Gurley of the Preservation Society of Charleston.
Charleston created its own historic district - a first in the United States to protect old structures - in 1931. It is slightly larger than the National Register district.
The city lists 6,187 historic buildings in the National Register district and 8,890 buildings in the older city-created district, said Linda Bennett of the city of Charleston.
Charleston retained its antebellum beauty largely because it never shared in the economic boom that swept and changed other Southern cities after the Civil War. As Charleston residents like to say, they were "too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint."
Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston hard in 1989, and that led to an infusion of insurance money that helped owners restore Charleston's aging buildings.
