Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories

Prologue

Adger’s Wharf

When I was a teenager in Charleston, South Carolina, I spent many hours along the Downtown waterfront. In those days, the 1930s and early 1940s, there were not one but two different and seemingly discrete Charlestons. For more than one reason, they could be designated as Uptown and Downtown, and often were.

Downtown Charleston was the old part of the city, with buildings that dated back to colonial times. It was the city that the tourists came to see, and where the old Charlestonians lived, the families whose forebears were the antebellum rice planters and merchant princes. Downtown Charleston was a city of narrow, sometimes winding streets with quaint and historical names like Longitude Lane and St. Michael’s and Price’s and Bedon’s and Stoll’s and Do As You Choose alleys and Tradd and Church and Water and Gibbes and Legaré and Lamboll and Orange and East Bay. In church affiliations it was Episcopalian and Huguenot and Presbyterian, with a few Unitarians and Congregationalists and Reform Jews whose tenure often went back to colonial and early federal times.

Downtown people were lawyers and doctors and professors and realtors and bankers and stockbrokers and businessmen and artists and writers and newspaper editors. Black people Downtown were colorful and primitive and wore bandannas and spoke Gullah, and they went about the streets hawking fish and shrimp and produce, and everyone knew their picturesque vending cries. The women wore uniforms to work and had names like Viola and Evalina.

Downtown was steeped in history, and its residents talked about and some few even remembered the firing on Fort Sumter, and Downtown was where there had been pirates and privateers and Revolutionary War heroes and blockade runners and Civil War generals. The older Downtown homes had outbuildings behind them that had once been slave quarters. Downtown there was culture and art, and painters and etchers made illustrations of the famous Sword Gates and St. Michael’s Church and the flower ladies on its portico and other quaint scenes, and authors wrote poems and stories and sketches extolling the uniqueness of the Carolina lowcountry, and the Dock Street Theatre performed plays, and there were concerts and recitals. Downtown was the place of the College of Charleston, the nation’s oldest municipal college, and the Historical Society and the Library Society and the New England Society, and also the St. Cecilia Society, where the females of the gentry made their entrance into social life.

Downtown was White Point Gardens and the Battery, with Fort Sumter visible across at the harbor mouth, and where the Fort Sumter Hotel and also the Villa Marguerita (which didn’t accept Jews as guests) were located. Downtown families were named Alston and Ball and Barnwell and Cheves and Drayton and FitzSimons and Huger and Lowndes and Manigault and Maybank and Mazyck and Pinckney and Porcher and Ravenel and Rhett and Simons (with one m only) and Smythe and Stoney and Vanderhorst and Waring; sometimes they even bore several of the names at the same time.

For recreation the Downtown residents kept sailing craft at the Carolina Yacht Basin, and they went sailing off the Battery and held regattas and raced snipes and scows and cruised in handsome yawls and ketches and schooners. They played tennis and golf. They hunted ducks in the abandoned rice fields of the lowcountry. They rode horseback and held fox hunts and steeplechase races. Downtown, in sum, was patrician and cultured and historical and scenic and romantic and literary. When you read about Charleston in a poem or a book it was always Downtown Charleston. If you saw a picture of the city in a magazine or in a painting or watercolor, Downtown Charleston was what was portrayed.

Uptown, by contrast, was plebeian and middle class and ordinary and not at all scenic and cultured and literary. Uptown people were named Bowman and Bierfischer and Blanchard and Bolchoz and Burmester and Castanes and Cohen and Connolly and Condon and Dennis and Finkelstein and Hesse and Jones and Karesh and McLaughlin and Morse and Muckenfuss and Murphy and Pearlstine and Rosen and Rubin and Shokes and Simmons (with two m’s) and Smith (spelled with an i, not a y) and Thomas and Wineberg. The Uptown streets were straight and not narrow, and bore names such as Maple and Poplar and Cypress and Peachtree and Grove and Line and Bogard and Allen and Cleveland and Alberta and Dunnemann. Uptown there were no lanes and no alleys.

Uptown people were Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics and Greeks and Jews. They were storekeepers and carpenters and mechanics and salesmen and policemen and navy yard workers and clerks and certified public accountants and dentists and power company linemen and railroad men and streetcar conductors and bus drivers and branch managers and merchants and pharmacists. The black people who worked Uptown did not wear bandannas and uniforms and did not sell flowers and were not picturesque.

Uptown there was almost nothing historical. There were railroad stations and freight yards and, north of the city limits, a few factories and the navy yard. There was a park with flowers and duck ponds and a zoo, and the campus of the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, but the park was not old, and the campus was a new one, not the historic Old Citadel of pink buildings with crenellations that was there when the cadets fired on the steamship Star of the West at the outbreak of the War Between the States.

There were no old and quaint buildings and gateways Uptown. The houses had front porches, not piazzas, with lawns and gardens fronting the street and in clear view, not in the side yard and back and visible only through ironwork gates. No tourists came from afar to see Uptown Charleston; the guidebooks did not describe its colonial charm. There were no historical societies Uptown, and girls who lived Uptown did not make their debuts.

For recreation Uptown people went to the movies, to baseball games at College Park, and to boxing matches, and they played baseball and basketball and poker. If they had boats, they were powered by gasoline engines, not sails, and were used for fishing. They did not race in regattas. When they played golf it was at the municipal links, not the country club. They were interested in cars, and they did not own horses and go fox hunting. Uptown people did not write or read poems, publish books, or do paintings and etchings. Uptown, in short, was middle class and democratic and everyday and practical, and very, very real.

Socially the city of Charleston was a very class-conscious city. As usually happens in such a place, not only the descendants of the pre–Civil War plantation gentry, most of whom lived south of Broad Street, but all the other elements in the population, from the top to the bottom of the social hierarchy, were divided into strata. Each successive stratum aspired to the next higher one on the scale and looked down on the stratum just below it. Another word for this is snobbery—and Charleston was a very snobbish place in those days. This was true of the Protestants, the Roman Catholics, the Jews, the Greeks; it was true of the whites and the blacks. One reason for this was that there wasn’t much money around Charleston then, and thus only so much opportunity for conspicuous consumption. Inherited social position was almost all there was to be snobbish about, so that almost the only area in which persons in search of status could look to demonstrate it was in genealogical distinction.

The Jewish community, of which my family was part, was like everyone else divided into Uptown and Downtown. K. K. Beth Elohim, the Downtown, Reform congregation, was the oldest Reform temple in the United States. B’rith Sholom and another synagogue were the Uptown, Orthodox congregations. Although the division was not really geographical, where one resided on the Charleston peninsula tended to reflect the degree of each group’s assimilation into the local secular culture. (The suburbs, of course, were another matter.)

The Reform congregation was made up of what remained of the old Sephardic Jewish families of colonial and early federal days, the German Jewish families of the mid– and late nineteenth century, and some latecomers. The Orthodox congregations were mostly of relatively more recent advent—Russians and Eastern Europeans who held on more closely to the customs, traditions, and language of the preimmigrant past.

Reform services were in English. Certain responses were written in Hebrew in the prayer book, but few members of the congregation could read them. There was a choir and organ music and no cantor. The dietary laws were observed, if at all, in very lax fashion. In short the Jewish community was undergoing the same process of assimilation that had gone on and was still going on within every American immigrant group from the early 1800s onward. Because Charleston was a small city, lacking enough people within the various ethnicities to constitute themselves into permanent enclaves, the assimilative process could be relatively rapid.

When I look back and try to make sense of what was involved, certain things strike me. The Downtown, Reform congregation, to which my family belonged, was very small; there were only three people in our confirmation class at Sabbath school. The congregation had dwindled away over the years, as people moved away or intermarried. In truth it was a dying community and in certain respects no longer displayed a distinctive ethnic identity at all.

The result was that by the time of my own generation—the generation growing up in the 1920s and 1930s—those who remained held on self-consciously to their position, looked down socially upon the Orthodox community, and took satisfaction in their supposed absence of secular identity. Judaism, they told themselves, was not an ethnic matter, but purely religious and theological (this while across the Atlantic the Nazis were making no such distinction).

Snobbery always involves pretense of course. The person who places a premium upon social status is almost always trying to prove something—not only to others but oneself. My own family for example did not extend back lengthy generations into Charleston life; my grandfather was European born—and in East Prussia or Lithuania, not western Europe—and came to the city only in the 1880s. Yet, for reasons that are not still quite clear to me, we were unquestionably part of the Downtown congregation. As I look back, I realize the extent to which my generation imbibed this way of thinking and feeling from infancy onward. In effect we were raised and tutored in a snobbery that was all the more absurd for being so specious.

In my own instance, the result was that I inhabited two worlds when I was growing up and was not wholly or fully of either, the more so because my literary ambitions and my interest in music and history were largely solitary activities. In my imagination, as someone who would some day become a writer, the Uptown and Downtown that I knew were discrete entities, linked by the slender umbilical cord of the Rutledge Avenue trolley and later bus line that as a high-school and college student I rode from our house at the edge of the northern city limits to the Downtown city on the lower peninsula.

That, I have come to believe, is in no small degree where Adger’s Wharf and my lifelong fascination with boats—and particularly workboats—comes in. Part of their lure for me, and that of the Cooper River waterfront in general, lay in the unique fusion, geographical, psychological, and cultural, of the two Charlestons that they offered to my imagination.

The small craft berthed at Adger’s Wharf were shrimp trawlers, cargo launches that served the nearby Sea Island communities, commercial fishing boats, the harbor pilot boats, crab and oyster buyboats, and a variety of other small craft. At the head of the south wharf were the three tugs of the White Stack Towboat Company. At the base of the north wharf was a large, mostly open-sided shed with a wide galvanized tin roof, where the catches of the shrimping fleet were bought, sorted by an array of black women, iced down, and shipped out. Just upstream and abutting Adger’s Wharf was a boatyard with a marine railway and a machine shop. The area was always busy.

Adger’s Wharf was considered to be one of the tourist attractions of the city; the trawlers and launches were frequently extolled in magazine articles as contributing to the quaintness and the romantic atmosphere of an old seaport town. By the mid-1930s, when I grew old enough to spend time down on the waterfront, make-and-break gasoline engines had replaced the sail power of the once-numerous mosquito fleet that seined for shrimp outside the harbor.

Before the advent of good roads, and bridges linking the Sea Islands to the mainland up and down the South Carolina coast, water transport had provided the principal means for moving passengers and goods between the city of Charleston and the farms, plantations, and small communities along the coast. Adger’s Wharf, at the foot of Tradd Street, was where many of the small shallow-draft launches in the island trade had docked.

By my time these had mostly succumbed to competition from automobile and buses. The trawlers and other workboats that did tie up at Adger’s Wharf tended to be motley affairs, many of them owned by black fishermen and painted with garish colors and odd decorations, including more than one eye to ward off the evil spirits lurking in the deep.

With their nets hung out to dry, their trawl boards and donkey engines, and the pungent aroma of dead fish and shrimp spoiling in the hot sun, these workboats were picturesque enough, I suppose.