Forward-thinking development projects across the peninsula have made headlines in the last few years: Parklets dotted pandemic-emptied streets, the Lowcountry Lowline promised multi-faceted linear park space and several transit projects assured greater pedestrian and cyclist access on downtown streets.
In many cases, these projects remain sporadic, temporary and unfinished. The Low Battery Project, however, has been moving steadily along, and is set to incorporate a sampling of each of the aforementioned elements.
The Low Battery runs from Tradd Street to E. Battery Street at the southern tip of the peninsula. It was constructed between 1909 and 1919 as a part of a large land reclamation project. The concrete wall of the Low Battery was built on a timber deck supported by timber pilings, skirted with concrete panels on the seaward face. This formed a wall system to retain the landside fill constructed later. By the end of the first phase of construction 1911, 47 acres of buildable land had been reclaimed and was divided into 191 residential building lots.
After more than a century of storms, rising seas and heavy winds, the wall was long overdue for repairs. In May 2015, the consulting firm Johnson, Mirmiran and Thompson began the surveying work necessary to accurately collect data needed for the assessment and design of the seawall.
“It was installed with methods at the time, and it’s just starting to deteriorate,” Fountain said. “We’ve obviously had some hurricanes that have done some damage, and we finally said, ‘OK, we need to do some major rehab.’ ”
Rethinking the Low Battery
The redesign of the Low Battery is set to create improved linear park space to the benefit of locals and tourists, according to the city’s director of stormwater management Matthew Fountain. “We expanded the size of the walkway on top, we added a bigger sidewalk on the far side of the street, we redid the streetscaping along the corridor, and we added parklets at the intersections.”
Parklets — small public spaces created by extending walkways out into the street — became a fascinating and popular experiment on the peninsula. Creating a European outdoor café feel, they offered a bit of help to local restaurants during the pandemic, when indoor dining was nonexistent. But to the chagrin of many, they were generally scrapped once travel began to resume as the pandemic waned.
“It’s shaping up to be a model for what we can do, not just along the Low Battery, but for the whole peninsula,” said City Council member Mike Seekings, whose district includes the Low Battery.
Seekings said he has been involved in the Low Battery project from day one and is excited about the prospects of parklets and linear park space being included along the battery wall.
“When you compare it to the proposed seawall we’ve been discussing for years now, they’re two completely different projects,” Seekings said. “One is an amenity for the entire community to enjoy, and the other is a monolithic, single-use wall that I think we can do a lot better than.
“If you go out and stand on the upper platform that just finished construction, you can look back toward the Coast Guard station and see 2,000 feet of completed project. It really gives you a great visual of what it’s going to be when it’s completed — a better, more robust Low Battery that will endure for centuries and an incredible linear park and amenity for the public.”
Compared to parklets, Linear park space has been less contentious, but equally as difficult to implement on the peninsula, where space is limited and land is highly sought-after by developers.
The Charleston Lowline is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to implement linear park space on the peninsula, with plans for the cavernous corridor underneath Interstate 26. In 1976, the newly elected Mayor Joseph P. Riley built the I-26 Linear Park — the Vivian Anderson Moultrie Playground, where King Street meets I-26 — but today it sits mostly unused as trucks rumble above.
Other, sporadic small projects including these forward-thinking development models have been proposed, but they are often too expensive and small in scale to gain much traction. The Low Battery project offers a chance for all of these ideas to come together.
“It’s that neat idea of, if you were to do each of these projects individually, you’d spend far more money than if you just did it all at once,” Fountain said. “It’s a great way to do a lot of things with less money.”
Construction moving along
The Low Battery work is divided into phases, with the first phase — which extended from Tradd Street to Ashley Boulevard — beginning in December 2019. Now, construction on the second phase — which continues from Ashley Boulevard to Limehouse Street — has wrapped up, and work on phase three — which would bring the repairs all the way to Battery Place near King Street — is slated to start in April, Fountain said.
Once completed, the Low Battery should look radically different than it did before construction started. Not only will the addition of linear parks and parklets offer more reason to visit the historic site, but an extension of the wall, with the capacity to go more than 2 feet higher in some places, could make it a more robust defense against rising sea levels. This is especially important, considering the long-term plan is to have the Low Battery blend into the first stage of the proposed billion-dollar seawall project.
“We’re trying to make sure that we don’t build it, and then 10 years down the line you build another wall right over on top of it,” Fountain said.
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