Nearly six months into the year-long pause on the S.C. State Ports Authority’s Union Pier development project, managers with the city of Charleston, the College of Charleston’s Joseph P. Riley Center for Livable Communities and local advocacy groups are taking the first steps to create a new community-driven plan.
“At the end of the day, a year feels like a long time, but with so many different layers to the project, here we are in early November, and we’ve barely gotten started,” said Historic Charleston Foundation CEO Winslow Hastie.
But, Hastie added, taking time to ensure project managers get started in the right direction is important.
“It’s all about the approach and the process,” he said. “To us, and this is what we wish could have happened the first go-round on Union Pier — instead of handing it off to a developer and them coming up with what they want to do and then hiring a bunch of consultants to make that happen — we’re sort of flipping the script. We’re leading with the way we think it should have been done: What does the community want and need?”
Community-driven
That question takes time to answer, Hastie said. Other project leaders agree.
“Union Pier has the potential to shape the legacy of our city,” Kendra Stewart, director of the Riley Center, told the Charleston City Paper. “The Riley Center has met with over 200 individuals to discuss the future of Union Pier, and we will launch a larger-scale, proactive community engagement initiative in January.
“That being said, we have already taken meaningful steps to ensure that stakeholders have been engaged from the very beginning.”
Hastie said there’s very little design going on at the moment.
“It’s really a lot of data,” he said. “People might get sick of hearing about it by the end of the process, but that’s not a bad thing,” he said.
Different groups involved in the planning process, including the city, the Riley Center and several local advocacy groups have formed their own teams to tackle coming challenges, including teams for community outreach, water planning, designing and more.
“We have already initiated some of those conversations in a kind of soft-launch approach during the peninsula plan public kickoff in September,” said Robert Summerfield, Charleston’s director of planning, preservation and sustainability. “We will hold more formal conversations around the amendment this coming December when we have the consultants back in town.”
December meeting dates have not been scheduled yet.
Water-first
Tying Union Pier to other waterfront developments through the city’s comprehensive plan is part of the key difference between the current project and the original proposal.
“The new phase of Union Pier planning will employ a water-first approach,” Stewart said. The water plan’s team will be making specific recommendations about ways to leverage the Union Pier site to protect against flooding and enhance coastal resilience.”
Hastie said one angle the team is looking at would let Union Pier act as an extension of a planned peninsula sea wall. However it ends up looking, though, project leaders agreed that incorporating ways for people to interact with the water is a key focus.
“We’re looking at a continuation of the promenade idea from Waterfront Park,” Summerfield said, “including ways not only to walk beside the water, but actually access it, touch it or throw a fishing line — maybe if you’re me and you get frustrated you throw the whole pole in.
“Creating that physicality with the water’s edge was a really great element of the previous plan, and I’m hoping we continue to see something along those lines in the reboot.”
More than a destination
Summerfield said another focus was to ensure Union Pier acted as an extension of the historical district of the peninsula and a functioning community, not just a tourist attraction.
“The development was multi-use in its original delivery,” he said. “Some folks thought it was a little too intense — specifically the height of some of the proposed buildings and the number of hotel rooms — and I would agree.
“I’m really hopeful the new team still tries to maintain some balance of residential with a significant portion of that being affordable, along with a healthy mix of commercial and retail,” he said. “We really are ultimately looking for this to be a new neighborhood that flows somewhat seamlessly into the existing fabric of the larger peninsula community. Adding yet another tourist hub was not necessarily what our goal was.” Hastie agreed.
“Obviously the sort of scale and character of the development are of huge importance to us,” he said. “This is an extension of the historic district, and we need to be careful about how we insert new developments.
“Leading with data and science and community feedback is the most important thing,” Hastie added. “From there, we can figure out how to craft value out of those inputs.”
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.
