There’s been a century-long clash in Charleston between the past and present that has become grittier in recent years. The zeal to make a buck competes with Charleston‘s legacy to preserve its buildings, character and history.
All of these new hotels, the incessant pounding of piledrivers and the continuing rise of prices of properties where longtime owners have been squeezed away are symptoms of this disease to mold Charleston into a historical Disney that the city’s original preservationists might not recognize.
Just look at recent headlines to see the conflict in which the forces of business are clashing with residents who don’t want so much change, so many cranes, so much traffic, so much noise.
Preservationists got a big win when they led the S.C. Ports Authority to back off of a redevelopment proposal at Union Pier that would have made it into a warren of chunky megabuildings that didn’t look like they fit in the Holy City. Now the city, along with philanthropist Ben Navarro and his team, seems to be on a more inclusive path to reshape the area by taking history, scale and modern times into consideration.
More recent is a construction project at Courier Square, where 74 sets of human remains seemed to be unearthed in the middle of the night and quietly reinterred elsewhere. The secrecy of that project may have flipped a community switch to make people want more input about another grave proposal nearby — the construction of a large dorm for the College of Charleston on an empty site where thousands of people may have been buried before the Civil War.
And now comes the next big historical thing: the U.S. Custom House on East Bay Street. Seems the federal government wants to get the grand historical building off of its books because nobody is really using it. A recent check showed no more than a dozen vehicles in a parking lot where lots of people used to work. The U.S. Public Buildings Reform Board, which recently had a public hearing with the city to discuss turning over the building, says it costs $414,000 a year to operate the building for the few people inside of a beautiful public building that’s closed to the public.
So the question ahead with this grand structure is what’s next? Another hotel? City offices? A different, grand public use? Fortunately, stakeholders like the Preservation Society of Charleston and the Historic Charleston Foundation have been involved with community thinking about what’s next. But what’s clear is that city council, not only a mayor with a developer-in-chief mindset, needs to help drive the train for the building’s future use.
Which is why a resolution by the city’s Commission on History to hire a full-time city archaeologist to protect buildings and involve more people in decisions is such a good idea.
Let’s listen to the words of Charleston historian Harlan Greene, the commission chair who told council members this week: “Preservation laws protect everything from the ground up,” he said. “But the hallowed ground on which we stand often has no protection for what lies beneath. It’s likely that this resolution just presented and the anxiety, concern and distrust that many of our citizens feel would not have arisen in the first place if this part of our history and our past was protected.”
Hear, hear.
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