The redevelopment of Union Pier, now under direction of local philanthropist Ben Navarro’s company Beemok, will not follow the same pre-fab, cookie-cutter approach as so many other mainstream developments.
With no master plan, no strict timeline and no real blueprint confining them, Beemok officials are instead taking mountains of research and building five key areas to guide what they’re calling “intentionally incremental” growth on the site: transportation, history, stormwater and resilience, public spaces, and what they call the DNA of Charleston.
At a series of public workshops and presentations in early March, Beemok broke all five areas down for neighborhood leaders, advocacy groups and other residents.
“When you look at the old city and how it developed organically and incrementally, all of the lessons are actually already here,” architect Chris Sottile told the Charleston City Paper. “The larger development world today just doesn’t follow the lessons that come from the best and oldest parts of Charleston.
“Rather than rush in and draw a plan,” he continued, “we’ve decided to really focus on these main themes that matter most and really take the time to understand each of those.”
Sottile said layering all of this research and data is a very different approach from the typical master plan, where everything is produced all at once.
“Everybody is addicted to instant results. But Charleston is not an instant city,” he said. “This is a city that developed one street, one block, one building at a time.”
A walkable city
The first area project leaders dove into was transportation, working with topic experts and engineers like Rick Hall, who devised a metric for measuring walkability in urban areas using the frequency of intersections.
“Most engineers refer to them as conflict points, but street corners promote walkability and provide benefits to the human walking experience,” Sottile explained.
Take renowned cities around the world for example. Copenhagen, often considered a walkable city, features 244 intersections per square mile, while a small suburban city like Walnut Creek, Calif., has only 77. According to Sottile, Hall found a standard 100 intersections per square mile is the bare minimum for a city or area to have even a chance at walkability.
In Charleston, the team measured every neighborhood on the peninsula, finding staggering results. Ansonborough, the neighborhood bordering Union Pier, holds an average of more than 300 intersections per square mile. The nearby French Quarter has more than 400. Even areas locally considered car-centric, like the Medical District, rest above that national benchmark.
“We are starting to have tangible, empirical numbers to be able to understand what makes each neighborhood what it is, and not just say general things like, ‘We like walkable streets,’ ” Sottile said. “And it started to create tools that we’ll be able to use later on to assess the work here.”
Other metrics used include the length and perimeter of blocks and classifying streets as walkable or vehicular, giving the team multiple layers of color-coded maps to build a base from.
Going back in time
Nic Butler’s Charleston Time Machine podcast gave the Beemok team a good starting point for delving into the history of Union Pier, Sottile said. Out of all 300 essays he had written, project leaders narrowed it down to about 30 relevant to the site.
The essays not only informed several steps of the planning process, but also a small-run publication called the Union Pier Historical Reader, a book that shares insight into the historical context of the project site.
One of the most important findings, Sottile said: the cruciality of the edge.
“A lot of contemporary plans start in the middle and work out to the edges, but we’ve done a 180,” he said. “So instead of inside out — outside in. That takes a much longer time horizon, because the edges are almost a scar tissue that formed around this area being industrial for so long. They need work.”
And inside, a covered-up network of streets and pathways that once made Union Pier a bustling waterfront.
“The last thing this is is a blank canvas,” Sottile said. “There’s so much history here. That’s part of the idea of this being working carefully and slowly and understanding each layer. Each layer teaches you something, and there are so many layers of history.
“Charleston has kind of lost its working waterfront, but it used to be here,” he continued.
“That’s one of the biggest lessons that has come through the understanding of the real history of this area. This was a place for all of Charleston, and it was a place where everyday life took place.”
Ongoing struggle with water
Charleston has a storied history and present with water and rising tides, but that fight has given the Beemok team a launching pad in its research into Union Pier’s waterfront.
“There’s so much time and effort put into how Charleston as a whole tackles this existential problem,” Sottile said. “So we spent a lot of time getting fully immersed in all of those efforts — the Dutch Dialogues, the city’s water plan — trying to understand the whole thing and what it means here.”
Mounds of data and survey maps sought not to solve the issue, he added, but to determine what is actually happening at the site. The research came together as a map of seven watersheds all connected and influencing the Union Pier site. Every pipe, every inlet and every project from the last few decades, Sottile said, was mapped.
“It was an amazing process to see. … This was the first time in recent history that all of this data was brought together onto maps where you can start to see how it all works.”
It’s a lot of information, he said, pointing to the wall-to-wall posters, printouts, diagrams and more that cover the team’s work space. “But if you don’t understand all of it, you’re not really going to understand any of it.”
New perspectives
Tapping local landscape artists and designers and employing powerful AI tools, the Beemok team found a new understanding of how people use public spaces — and who is using them in the first place.
All 20 public parks on the peninsula were analyzed, Sottile said, a first for Placer AI, which typically looks at private businesses instead of public spaces.
Waterfront Park was one of the first. About 2% of its visitors come from residents within one mile of the park. About 20% come from the greater Charleston area — about 10 miles away.
And the final 78% come from out-of-town visitors and tourists.
Meanwhile, Theodora Park, near the Gaillard Center, looks very different. The small, embedded park sees about two-thirds of its visitors from neighborhood and greater Charleston residents. While only one third come from long-distance travelers.
Heat maps also gave insight into how parkgoers congregate along the edges of the space, near streets, huddling in shaded areas during the hot summer months and moving out into sunnier areas during the winter.
“It all needs to be discussed,” Sottile said — the park’s relationship to streets, providing enclosed spaces with nice views and engaging water at the edge.
The DNA of Charleston
The team’s final point explored a more cerebral view of the city’s skyline inspired partly by the writings and thoughts of the late European urbanist Leon Krier.
To create a true city, he wrote, you must start with the public realm — institutional, ecclesial, educational, governmental and more.
And when you look at Charleston, Sottile said, you can see that idea at work.
“They are very well distributed,” he said. “They’re not all in one place, though of course, there’s a conspicuous absence of them [at Union Pier]. But if we start with that point of view, then it means that these will be the most special opportunities, and they shouldn’t be an afterthought, but they should lead the planning as we get into that stage of work.”
Sottile pointed to varying heights of buildings that line the city’s walkable streets as evidence of incremental design and construction. That variance also lends to the idea of a “living city,” and is reminiscent of a visual heartbeat.
“It’s photographed endlessly and painted, but subconsciously, what you may actually be seeing is this EKG meter, and a living skyline,” Sottile said. “The city is alive, and that’s why it feels so good. … And when we see that EKG meter go flat, we know it’s not a good thing.
“We have too many examples of this already. … And it’s particularly hard to bear when we see it built in Charleston. It does great damage.”
Community leaders, residents respond to Union Pier presentation
Advocacy groups, neighbors and Lowcountry leaders came away from Beemok’s recent Union Pier presentations feeling blown away by the level of research, attention to detail and transparency involved in the ongoing redevelopment of the historic site.
Historic Ansonborough Neighborhood Association President Angela Drake said she attended several of the public workshops, held in early-to-mid March.
“There’s a cohesive partnership between the city and Beemok and the neighborhoods,” she said. “We’ve been included in all of their conversations. It’s just been a great experience.”
It’s a sigh of relief after the long time of mostly quiet progress made in the background by project leaders after local philanthropist Ben Navarro announced plans to buy the site in early 2024. At the time, Navarro said he wanted to be a “steward” to the troubled patch of Charleston waterfront, not a developer. Now, some are hoping this mindset becomes the norm.
“It’s just amazing,” Drake said. “This process has been one of consideration for all — the market, the neighborhoods, the city as a whole. It’s not just one small project. This is going to set the precedent for projects all over the country, if not the world.”
A dramatic shift
Historic Charleston Foundation President Winslow Hastie said it feels like the culmination of more than a year of work finally paying off.
“We’ve been attending ‘Union Pier University’ for a year now, and what has struck me is how deeply they are diving into each of the five focus areas that they’ve identified,” he said. “They are bringing in respected outside experts for each area and are really taking their time to understand each topic. No private developer ever does that.”
Hastie was just one of several who said the way Beemok is handling the project should be the model for future developments in the Holy City.
“This is what every design team should do,” said Preservation Society of Charleston President Brian Turner. “You can’t plan for the future of a site unless you know what’s there, and this isn’t a surface level review. This is very thorough. I like to think this is a very model process.”
It’s the total opposite of the last attempt at redeveloping the site spearheaded by the S.C. Ports Authority, he added. “They have flipped the script on how a normal developer approaches a project.” The biggest shift, he said, is the change of focus from financial investments to overall quality and durability. And he isn’t the only one who noticed.
“Not once in two-and-a-half hours of presentation was there a single mention of, ‘Well, we have to make the numbers work,’ ” said Sullivan’s Island resident Madeleine McGee. “There wasn’t a single discussion of the financial ramifications.”
Though McGee said she wasn’t certain if that was a good sign or not, she said she came away feeling confident and excited for the future of the project.
More to come
That’s not to say people don’t have questions, though, as the lack of a master plan has longtime locals raising an eyebrow.
“We still haven’t seen any site plans, maps, etc. that chart out the entitlements they ultimately will need to seek,” Hastie said. “They prefer to talk about a ‘framework plan’ versus a ‘master plan,’ which is fine, but at some point they’re going to need updated zoning to allow development to occur there. … How all that fits together is extremely important, and it is still unclear to me how they plan to approach this aspect of planning.”
Turner agreed, adding that he’s also interested in learning more about site grading and water management as the project moves forward. Though, he said, he is being patient.
“They’ve told us they’re not there yet, and we’ve taken them at their word.”
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.