Union Pier redevelopment project leaders wrapped up on a second March round of public workshops at the historic site. That in-person look gave many Charleston residents their first opportunity to see storied locations like the Mosquito Fleet landing site and the Bennett Rice Mill Facade up close.
“As we engage with the public, one of the ideas we wanted to bring to the Union Pier project was to get the public on the site,” said Thomas Woltz, an owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), one of the lead design firms for the project. “For many Charlestonians who have lived here their whole lives, they don’t actually know Union Pier very well. You see it from East Bay, but it’s been fenced off for a long time.”
NBW was responsible for the Angel Oak redevelopment on Johns Island and is currently working on a master plan for Middleton Place. Woltz said both projects helped to inform them on Union Pier, because they learned more about the people and history of Charleston.
“The process of those two projects is equally applicable to Union Pier,” he said. “When we begin any of these projects, we start with a period of deep research and deep listening. In a way, we can look at all human history and land as a dance between culture and ecology. When you start to catalog that, you get to know a place in a deep way.”
It’s that core understanding of the space that project leaders said they wanted to share with other residents by bringing them on-site.
“Union Pier has been largely closed off to the public for a generation now,” said Sam Spence, public affairs director of the Preservation Society of Charleston. “Getting out there and seeing the scale of things … really highlights the potential for the site but also immediately queues the challenges associated with any development there and underscores the importance of involving residents in the process.”
This is a vastly different approach than the 2020-2023 iteration of the Union Pier redevelopment project, which was spearheaded by the S.C. State Ports Authority and drew heavy criticism from residents and legislators for its inclusion of high-rise hotels and mixed-use development that felt out of place on the peninsula.
A rich history
Union Pier has a lot of history, such as stories of the Mosquito Fleet and Bennett Rice Mill.
For years, generations of Gullah Geechee fisherman would set out from Union Pier to travel as far 20 miles in all kinds of weather and water conditions nearly every day for over a century to catch fresh seafood.
Enslaved people built the Bennett Rice Mill Facade in 1844, and it still stands as a reminder that Black labor enabled and facilitated the growth and development of Charleston prior to the rice industry’s collapse at the end of the Civil War.
“The history has been such a big part of the engagement process,” said Margit Liander, associate principal designer with Sasaki, the leading design firm working on Union Pier’s redevelopment. “It’s been really fun to bring the community along with the process and make sure those historical narratives are really captured in both the planning process as well as the design process.
“It’s something that we want the community to really be connected to and have that be something that’s not just a checkbox at the beginning of the process,” she added.
Philip Dugdale, another associate principal designer with Sasaki, said he wants the final design to incorporate that history at every level.
“In the same way we create a framework for the materiality and planning and the overall look and feel of the open space, the storytelling is equally important,” he said. “As we develop this plan and move further down the line of design, we want to embed that history into the framework itself so that in the future, as this plan develops over time, it remains a core principle that is weaved throughout it.”
Spence said the history of the site mirrors the growth of the peninsula.
“The story of how Union Pier has evolved really follows the story of the city,” he added. “It’s boom and bust, growth and expansion. At the core of it all is the people associated with how this place grew. And just the fact that a lot of it is fill land … mirrors the growth of Charleston elsewhere.”
History-driven, future-proof
While the project team is spending a lot of time getting to know the history of the site, it is focused just as much on its future.
“The scale of this site makes it such a transformative project that can address so many broader needs across the peninsula, the city, the whole region really,” Liander said. “It would be a missed opportunity to not align the future of this site to that.”
Dugdale agreed.
“Thinking creatively about how we think about this as a district itself, we’ve talked about mobility and access,” he said. “The next step is to critically evaluate those and start thinking about how we may integrate some of those processes into the overall framework.”
Project leaders said they hoped understanding the history of the site, as well as its present-day challenges, will help residents better contribute to the design process.
“What’s really exciting about this workshop is that [in late January], we brought everyone together and we said, ‘In an ideal world, what would you want to see?’ ” said Ali Moriarty, assistant director with the Riley Center for Liveable Communities at the College of Charleston “Now, we’re providing all of this context, all of this data, and we’re coming to this now from a place of trust … and asking the community to take it all in and then give feedback that’s a little more nuanced and refined and more to the context of the reality of the site.”
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