Charleston, redux

In the end, the best thing you can do in a visit to Charleston (besides eat) is just walk the streets and ogle the houses. From the grand ...


to the grander ...


from a distance ...


or in the little detail you can only see up close ...


and even at night ...


... they are just endlessly fascinating.

I'd love to own one some day.

If only it weren't in South Carolina.

Thanks again for reading. See you next time!

Gone With the Wind

The tourist circuit of Charleston generally includes a stop at one of the grand plantations that generated the city's pre-Civil War wealth. We chose to visit the one called Middleton.

I was expecting a grand mansion, but hadn't reckoned with Sherman's soldiers, who left behind only this where the main house used to be (the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 didn't help either):


The gardens, however, are beyond beautiful, especially during azalea season:





And then there was this fellow, sunning himself beside one of the ponds:


Yes, wild alligators are actually found as far north as Charleston, even though there are freezes almost every winter.

Fort Sumter

Charleston's most famous sight is, of course, Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started 150 years ago this month.

It's barely visible from the city, though, built on a sandbar at the mouth of the harbor, where, as the locals say, "the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean." (In case you're wondering, that's the Ashley on the right and the Cooper on the left. Fort Sumter is the little patch of land just to the right of the radio antenna.)


Even with a telephoto lens you can't make out much from the city's waterfront. But we thought we could see a U.S. flag defiantly flying:


And as we approached on the ferry, there was no question that that's what it was:


But wait a minute: that's a peculiar version of the flag:


It turned out that the flag was not a generic symbol of the damn Yankees, er, victorious Union government, but rather a replica of the 33-star flag that flew over the fort in the days before it was attacked, which was flying as part of the re-enactment marking the war's anniversary. The real thing is inside the fort's museum:

Other than the museum, there's not that much to see. The fort was pretty much destroyed during the war -- not by the initial Confederate attack (the tiny Union garrison, unprepared for a siege, surrendered rather quickly), but by a Union counterattack near the end of the war that took more than a year to drive out the Confederate defenders.


On top of the ruined fort was built a 20th century-style coastal defense battery, which now houses the museum but otherwise holds no interest to most visitors:


The most interesting part of the Fort Sumter story, to me anyway, wasn't in the fort at all, but at the Edmonston-Alston House, one of the grand mansions on the city's waterfront. It was here, from this balcony, that General Beauregard, the Confederate commander, watched the initial attack on Fort Sumter:



And this, minus the palmettos (which were planted well after the war), is what he saw:


He must have had a good telescope.

The Gay Mecca That Isn't

Those of you reading this blog who are attuned to gay culture might well be thinking: Charleston seems like it could be a gay mecca.

I've talked about the beautiful, antique mansions and houses, many of them lovingly restored; the gardens (more on that to come soon); and the food culture. And the city also has plenty of art galleries and antique stores, and a much higher-level cultural scene (e.g. Spoleto) than most cities its size.

But it's in South Carolina.

Which means, not only is it subject to the state's conservative politics and Christianist culture (the road to the airport is lined with billboards advertising Jesus), but also it still hasn't gotten over the Civil War: you still hear tales of people swearing they'd rather let their house be torn down than sell it to a Yankee.

Anywhere else in the country, you'd walk these beautiful streets and see rainbow flags flying and same-sex couples strolling. Here, you see absolutely no trace of either.

As far as we could tell, gay life in the downtown area is limited to two venues tucked away on a side street behind the main visitors' center.

The first, Dudley's, is a medium-sized bar with a vaguely 19th-century interior, decorated in wood and stained glass, with a second room in the back housing a pool table. It was pretty much empty when we walked in at 10:30 last Saturday night but started filling up by 11 with a nondescript, not particularly friendly crowd of all ages and sexes.

Down the street is Pantheon, a dance club, in the first floor of a modern parking garage. It's a big square room, a bar dominating one half, a slightly raised, enclosed dance floor in the other. Although the building looks to be less than 10 years old, the interior of Pantheon looks timelessly dingy and shabby. The music was a bit retro, and so were the people: one person wound glowsticks all around his body in true '90s rave style, while the rest embraced a dress code of untucked, button-down shirts, like New Yorkers of 2007.

The crowd at Pantheon was a bit younger than at Dudley's, but still quite mixed; I'd estimate it at 15% straight (men and women) and 30% lesbian. There were a number of obviously military types present, some clearly straight, some less so. Almost the entire crowd was white, which surprised me a bit this deep in the South. The mode of dancing was relatively restrained, and only a few shirts came off.

Still, we probably would have managed to have fun had they not shut off the music at midnight and cleared the entire dance floor for a drag show. A bad drag show, just basic lip-synching, neither funny nor particularly skilled. As I've also seen in Key West (but not elsewhere), the crowd began tipping the drag queen with dollar bills, as if she were a stripper. This was about the moment when we decided to leave.

It's really too bad, as Charleston is so attractive in so many ways. But a gay destination, unfortunately not.

Flag of Their Fathers

OK, I can't resist a little snark here.

South Carolina's state flag is one of the most simple and recognizable in the United States, highly evocative of the beauty of the place.


This flag has been pretty much the same since colonial days, but that doesn't keep one from wondering when some uninformed Tea Party person will start accusing the Islamists of sneaking a Muslim symbol onto it. After all, that crescent moon looks pretty much like the ones found on the flags of Turkey ...


... or Algeria ...


Surely Sharia rule can't be far behind, can't it?

JUST KIDDING, my friends ...

Low Country, High Cuisine

In addition to all its other charms, Charleston is one of the nation's great eating towns, with a food culture to rival those of New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.

We ate at a couple of the renowned high-end restaurants that have been much written about lately, but also at neighborhood bakeries and wine bars like this one, which we just stumbled into while walking around one afternoon:


The wine selections were excellent and, while we didn't have any food here, the cheeses and charcuterie looked great as well. You know you're in a great food town where randomly chosen places like this turn out well.

What is Charleston cuisine? Heavy -- very heavy -- on corn and seafood. Shrimp and grits is the local dish, and many of the high-end places reinvent it in various ways, such as forming the grits into polenta-like squares. Hush puppies frequently show up in various guises. She-crab soup is another local specialty; it is basically a triple-cream crab bisque. None of this food is for the faint-hearted or small-waisted, even when accompanied by locavore, seasonal vegetables like the first ramps and pea shoots of spring. But it is good.

And at prices averaging about 30% less than you'd pay for food of similar quality in New York, even better.

Up in the Attic

Charleston's museum claims to be the oldest in the country, founded in 1773. It certainly is a serious museum, with thoughtful exhibits on the region's history, and it runs some of the mansion-museums in town as well.

But it also has its quirky, your-uncle's-cluttered-attic side. There is a Burma Shave sign ...


... a stuffed piping plover ...


... and who knows what to make of this exhibit, a buffalo in Egypt ...


If nothing else, it's a charming way to take a break from the heat.

Slavery, part 2

One postscript on the subject of slavery: while the mansion museums tell the story from the point of view of the plantation households, the Old Slave Mart Museum, shown here, comes at it from a different angle:


This building was where slaves actually were bought and sold in the 1850s, and inside (no photography was allowed, unfortunately) you will see artifacts of the harsher side of slavery, including shackles and whips, and exhibits about each type of participant in the business. Well worth a visit.

... and its Peculiar Institution

I mentioned in my previous post that houses in Charleston were typically built on narrow pieces of street frontage. But the more well-to-do citizens had lots that, if narrow, were often long. These lots were sometimes used for gardens ...


... but also for service buildings like laundries and kitchens (in the olden days, there was a rule that kitchens had to be in a separate building at least 18 feet from the main house, for fear of fire), and for slave quarters.

Here is one of the city's most famous mansions, the Aiken-Rhett House, home to one of South Carolina's governors before the civil war:


Out back are, to the left the kitchen and laundry, and to the right the carriage house. The slaves who worked in each building slept on the second floor, as did those who worked in the main house. All told there were about a dozen slaves in residence at this one mansion (the Aiken family also owned several hundred who worked on plantations elsewhere in the state):


Most of the mansion/museums we visited were quite matter-of-fact about the history of slavery and took pains to discuss the lives of the slaves as well as of the planters (though one tour guide we encountered couldn't bring herself to pronounce the word, referring to them as "servants" instead).

The slaves, of course, were freed after the Civil War, and the Aiken-Rhett family's fortunes declined rapidly. This story is well told inside the mansion, which unlike others in Charleston, hasn't been restored; rather, it was left pretty much as it was when the last of the Aikens moved out in 1975. It tells a true Southern Gothic tale: rooms gradually abandoned and sealed off, the ballroom converted to a bedroom, plaster cracking and paint peeling. Definitely worth a visit.

The Peculiar Houses of Charleston ...

I liked the look of Charleston immediately. The downtown area is lined with historic houses, well surrounded by gardens:


These houses represent a wide range of history, from the 1700s to around 1900 (Charleston's greatest prosperity came in the 1830s and 40s, but much of what you see today was built or rebuilt after the city was destroyed in the Civil War), and also, as you can see, a range of architectural styles.

One style stands out, though, because it's unique to the city. This is what's known locally as a "single house":



You see them in many neighborhoods, and clearly in many price ranges, but all have this in common: The short end faces outward because street frontage was at a premium on the narrow peninsula where the city was built, and the balconies (known locally as "piazzas") were oriented the way they were to catch the prevailing winds.

Most interestingly, the front door does not open into the house, but rather onto one of the piazzas. Since this person left his door open the day we were there, you can see what it looks like:



We didn't get to go inside one of these houses (most are still in private hands), but I would love to know what it's like to live this way.

A Time-Traveling Trip to Charleston, S.C.

We visited Charleston, S.C., a couple of weeks ago, arriving very, very late at night. So our first impression of the place was at breakfast the next morning at our B&B. It is very beautiful ...


... and in some ways, very retro. This was was they served us for breakfast:



Yes, that's a copy of the local print newspaper.

Who would have expected that in 2011?

More to come ...