The children of the men and women who sold things like wallets, watches and wigs along Upper King Street are sharing stories of how their Jewish and African American ancestors built one of America’s iconic commercial districts.
By the end of this year, the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston plans to have more than 1,000 oral histories that will be part of an application to nominate Upper King Street as a National Register Historic District.
The application to the U.S. Department of the Interior will also include the history of 100 historically significant buildings along the street and a detailed narrative on the corridor’s evolution from the 1890s to the middle of the 20th century.
Architectural historian Brittany Tulla, owner of BVL Historic Preservation Research in Charleston, has worked for two years to prepare the district’s nomination application.
“We have to study every building in the corridor and then connect it all to the history and the cultural traditions of the street,” she told the Charleston City Paper.
Upper King Street today is no longer a throbbing, diverse commercial and residential community of Asian, Eastern European and Black cultures, she said.
“The buildings are still there so how can we recapture that, celebrate that and honor that?” Tulla asked.
The proposed district starts at 403 King, which is today’s Community Outreach Center at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, and ends at 609 King, a building with a late 1930s storefront at the Columbus Street intersection, she said.
The city of Charleston and the Preservation Society of Charleston along with Jewish families who donated through the Charleston Jewish Federation have invested $100,000 to prepare the application and collect the oral histories, she said.
The historic designation is limited to buildings facing King Street. But it could be expanded to include businesses on Coming, Morris and St. Philip streets that contributed to the King Street commercial corridor.
The Mazo Family
Owen Meislin’s family was one of the first Jewish families on King Street. In the 1960s, Meislin worked in the family’s delicatessen at 478 King St., which is today’s Silver Dollar bar.
Meislin said his maternal great-grand uncle, Dave Mazo, came to America from Minsk, Belarus, in the early 1900s. Initially, he operated a grocery store on Folly Beach to earn enough money to pay for his brother, Elihu Mazo, Meislin’s great-grandfather, to come to Charleston.
Elihu Mazo married Essie Tandet of Odessa, Ukraine, in Europe before they came to America with their first child, Betty. They were Owen Meislin’s maternal great-grandparents. To make money, Elihu Mazo sold pickles and vegetables from a pushcart on King Street. The couple opened a grocery store at 478 King St. between Mary and Ann streets. They lived in four rooms over the store with their eight girls and two boys. Elihu Mazo eventually bought the building.
Mazo’s Grocery was an essential source of food for families in the close-knit district, Meislin said.
“My grandfather pickled his own cucumbers, slaughtered his own kosher chickens behind the store,” Meislin said. “He had cheese and deli foods.”
Following his grandfather’s death in 1949, other relatives tried to continue the business. Meislin’s uncle, Sammy Mazo, took it over in the 1960s, transforming the grocery to a delicatessen. He cooked hamburgers on a charcoal-fired grill in the store’s front window.
Meslin worked there occasionally before he left Charleston in 1969 to enroll in college in Atlanta. He returned to the city to follow his mother, Minnie Mazo Meislin, in the real estate business. The family sold the building in the 1990s.
A cultural shift
Longtime Black Charleston residents remember Upper King Street as a more welcoming place than Lower King when Charleston was a racially segregated city, Tulla said.
“We find that beginning before World War II, there were immigrant families who tended not to be segregationists,” she said. Black Charlestonians worked in the Jewish-owned businesses and lived nearby. Jewish families also had similar stories of discrimination in their mother countries, she explained.
“In the 1950s, Jewish families began to move out of Upper King and Black families began to acquire storefronts along Upper King,” she said. “A big chunk of Upper King began to be Black-owned.”
Elaine Jenkins, the youngest daughter of the late civil rights icon Esau Jenkins of Johns Island, said she and her family “wholeheartedly” support the plan to have a historic designation for the district. In 2023, the Jenkins family tried to get their property at the southwest corner of King and Cannon streets on the national register, but the application was denied, she said.
In 1971, Esau Jenkins, his wife, Janie B. Jenkins and their children, purchased 569 King, 569½ King St., 571 King and 1 Cannon St., Elaine Jenkins said. When the Jenkins family bought the property, the buildings were rented to merchants.
After Honest John Record Shop left 569 King St., James Jenkins, the Jenkins’ youngest son, and Stanley Buncomb, operated Hot Spot Record Shop at 569 King, she said.
“We all worked at Hot Spot Record Shop,” she remembered. The shop had a symbiotic relationship with the Black-owned WPAL radio station, she said. Radio listeners visited the record store to purchase the music they heard on the radio, she added.
Both ends of King Street were also a hotbed of social justice protests in summer of 1963 through the Charleston Hospital Strike in 1969, Tulla said.
Unceremoniously, a building at King and Woolfe streets that once housed the late Jim French’s Black-owned newspaper, The Charleston Chronicle, which covered those protests, was demolished last year.
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