The last year has been jam-packed with news headlines that made waves across the Lowcountry and the Palmetto state. It seemed like each passing month brought bigger, more impactful stories, keeping us busy and you informed.
Just like Spotify, we’re bringing you 2024 wrapped with a nice bow so you can reminisce or sigh before ringing in 2025.
January: Cogswell takes helm as Charleston’s new mayor
Former state Rep. William Cogswell became the first Republican mayor of the city of Charleston in nearly 150 years when he took the oath of office Jan. 8. While Cogswell told interviewers his campaign did not focus on partisanship, he received support from several Republican leaders and organizations during his campaign and after his election. More than 500 people bundled in scarves and coats attended Cogswell’s inauguration on a chilly Monday afternoon. The crowd might have been larger, except for one pesky event going on about the same time: President Joe Biden’s speech that day at the Emanuel AME Church.
February: Union Pier reset: Workshops give fresh community insights
Union Pier’s new planning team did a lot of listening over the year as it worked to take the future of the 70-acre downtown area in a new direction. The team held the first round of public workshops in late January and into February in what it called “a reset” for the site’s design. Hundreds of people flocked to the workshops, which featured several boards developed by project leaders that offered new insights into the location and gave opportunities for guests to give their earnest feedback and adjust the project’s trajectory.
March: Change-makers and ceiling-breakers: Charleston women who made history
In celebration of women’s history month, the Charleston City Paper highlighted a few of the many women in Charleston’s history who made the Holy City better. From civil rights pioneers to suffragists to artists, these women paved the way for others in Charleston and are recognized for their legacies locally, nationally and across the globe. Those featured included Septima P. Clark, the “mother of the Civil Rights Movement;” Carrie Pollitzer, who established the city’s first free kindergarten program; and Mary Moultrie, who was among the first MUSC employees to speak out against the unfair treatment of Black workers at the hospital in 1969.
April: Dominion’s tree-cutting draws ire
Charleston’s grand oak trees, native palmettos and magnolias lining streets along several area neighborhoods all have one major threat in common — “chainsaw-wielding tree thugs,” as one resident put it in our April 26 report. While Dominion’s arborists follow state guidelines for pruning tree limbs to keep them away from power lines, residents often repeated that the cutters refused to differentiate cutting practices depending on the species of tree, ultimately butchering slow-growing native magnolias in the same way as fast-growing hardy oaks that recover quickly. In later months, Dominion proposed funding for burying power lines in different neighborhoods, which could protect local trees from future pruning seasons.
May: Battle to save lives and prevent fatal drug overdoses continues
In a May 16 follow-up to a 2023 cover story, the City Paper told the story of Thomas Young, a support counselor with the Charleston Center, the county’s drug rehabilitation center, who overdosed on fentanyl in the spring of 2020 and whose life was saved by emergency responders. Young now uses his near-death experience as a peer-support specialist helping people who struggle with addiction after a two-year certification process. Between 2021 and 2023, 462 people died after ingesting fentanyl, an average of 154 people annually.
June: State book regulation poses threat to freedom, advocates say
Free speech advocates warned state legislators that hundreds of books, including literary classics like The Handmaid’s Tale, could vanish from public school libraries in our June 8 report. A new S.C. Department of Education regulation that opponents criticized for its vague language took effect June 25, setting up a long battle between state education authorities and advocacy groups over what constituted “age-appropriate” classroom material. The regulation is part of a nationwide trend, according to the ACLU of South Carolina, which denounced the measure as a threat to parents, students and teachers alike. The new regulation eventually led to the banning of several books locally in the fall.
July: S.C. logs 26 officer-involved shootings halfway through 2024
About once a week, somebody in South Carolina is shot in a confrontation with police, the City Paper reported July 19. Since the beginning of the year through July 17, there were 26 so-called “officer-involved shootings” in South Carolina. That’s four more than the 22 logged at the same time last year, according to records from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). More than half of all reported officer-involved shootings occurred in Upstate counties. More than a quarter occurred in Lowcountry counties. The summer report broke down every situation that resulted in a fatal interaction with police, from physical altercations to exchanges of gunfire.
August: City quietly rolls out new branding based on historic seal
During a week plagued by stormy weather in early August, the City of Charleston quietly changed the branding used in its weekly newsletters and daily hurricane messages, setting up a months-long kerfuffle between the mayor’s office and Charleston City Council members who said they were blindsided by the change. The new brand used a lot of similar iconography as the historic city seal which previously emblazoned the city’s documents, but the minimalist, modernized design dropped a lot of original details and embellishments that made local landmarks recognizable. The mayor’s office, after being called out by council members in public meetings, later walked back comments to the City Paper that the new “logo” was a placeholder and would be part of a larger plan to rebrand the city under Cogswell’s new administration.
September: Charleston prepares to ‘live with water’
The challenge of living with water on the Charleston peninsula began in the 1680s when European settlers moved Charles Towne from West Ashley to high ground between the Ashley and Cooper rivers that wasn’t “washed by the tides,” the City Paper wrote in a Sept. 15 report. When Cogswell and other officials recently unveiled the city’s new water plan at City Hall, he said the concepts were aspirational, and that he was confident they would help the community better understand what it means to “live with water.” Cogswell’s water plan built on a 2019 Dutch Dialogues Charleston report, the 2021 Charleston City Plan and the proposed peninsula protection system, among others penned during former Charleston mayor John Tecklenburg’s time at the helm.
October: Cogswell nearly throws wrench in Ashley River pedestrian bridge plan
Late October and early November were marked by rapid changes to a years-long effort to move forward with a pedestrian bridge spanning the Ashley River to connect downtown Charleston to West Ashley in a safe and reliable way. Cogswell proposed new additions to the plan, which surprised opponents criticized for being more “style over substance.” The proposals were made more contentious as the project had already been designed, vetted, approved and funded after years of painstaking community work, and the changes could delay construction. Cogswell later conceded several of the changes, and construction began in November as planned in West Ashley.
November: Charleston voters resoundingly reject sales tax referendum
Charleston County residents sent a solid “no” message to county leaders during the Nov. 5 election when they rejected a half-cent sales tax extension that would have raised billions for road and other projects, including the decades-long boondoggle that is the Interstate 526 extension. The referendum was rejected by every precinct on James and Johns islands, where about half of the funds from the referendum (about $2.3 billion) would have gone to the extension of I-526, including more than $600 million to pay interest costs on a tax-backed loan worth $1.8 billion. Opponents of the referendum pointed to its vague wording and the county’s poor track record on wise spending of public dollars as the reasons for its failure.
December: Squeezed: Rosemont under pressure by old pollution, new development
Years of coverage and historical looks at the troubled chemical plant that shadows the Rosemont community in Charleston’s neck area culminated with a Nov. 29 deep dive into the neighborhood’s past, present and future. The community is caught between a rock and a hard place, squeezed by challenges like flooding, an accident-prone chemical plant and gentrification. In the midst of this is a January election in which most of the community’s neighborhood association will be replaced. The planned Magnolia Project on the horizon is seen as a threat to the mostly Black community, as it could further gentrify the upper peninsula and finally push out families who have been there for generations.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.