Bringing Back the Heritage

A decade ago, the six-block Ansonborough district in downtown Charles ton, S.C., was a virtual slum. Most of its two-and three-story town houses, once the fashionable city residences of 19th century planters, tradesmen and aristocrats, were in varying stages of decay. Some were tenements occupied by as many as a dozen families. Any one without a keen eye for early-American architecture could easily have strolled Ansonborough's streets and missed its charm, which included the city's oldest house and first public high school. Indeed, the stroller might have considered the area a fine candidate for mass demolition.

Marbles & Mantels. But for those who looked hard enough, the charm was there. And in 1959, the Historic Charleston Foundation decided that it was there in sufficient quantity to justify something different in urban restoration. Started in 1947 mainly to pre serve an occasional home or mansion of exceptional quality, the foundation suddenly saw in Ansonborough the chance, or challenge, to save an entire residential district, not as a community museum restoration like colonial Williamsburg, but as homes occupied by people who had taste and a yen for the convenience of downtown living. With a $100,000 revolving fund created by private donors, Mrs. S. Henry Edmunds, the foundation's director, and the 24 citizens on its board began buying up the pre-Civil War houses and reselling them to single families for as little as $5,000 each. Under 75-year restrictive covenants, it retained control over all changes made by the owners in the exteriors of the houses. It also reserved the right to match, within a period of 96 hours, any offer to buy.

One of the more charming buildings that the foundation bought and then resold was the three-story brick house at 60 Anson Street, built in 1851 by Planter R. M. Yenning and occupied later by an up-and-coming young merchant named Claus Spreckels, who went on to make millions in sugar in California and Hawaii. When Robert M. Hitt Jr., 53-year-old editor of the Charleston Evening Post, bought it for $10,000 in 1965, not much of its original elegance was left. The ground floor, used as a grocery store by Spreckels, was empty, and the porch was crumbling. On the top two stories, where several poor Negro families occupied apartments, the floors and walls were rotting. Outside, the yard was filled with trash, and the walls were covered with stucco fragments, peeling paint and faded ads.

"Right after I bought the place, I thought maybe I had lost my marbles," Hitt recalls. But he did not think so for long. Four and a half months later, he had changed some of the inner walls, installed modern heating, cooking and bathing facilities, as well as air conditioning, replaced the sagging porch with a marbled patio, got special approval from the foundation for a set of strictly un-Charleston French doors, built a nine-foot wall along Anson Street out of old bricks from two discarded chimneys, and decorated the interior with 18th century antiques and Oriental throw rugs. In all, he put $35,000 into the renovation. What he could not buy, he got with ingenuity. Rummaging through several other old houses about to be demolished, he came up with just the right number of old steps, as well as banisters to adorn the otherwise new stairway he had to reconstruct between the first and second floors. The foundation helped him find several good period mantels.

Surpassing the Prototype. The same sort of restoration process is taking place in more than 80 of Ansonborough's 125 pre-Civil War houses. More than 100 new families have moved into the district, a few taking over apartments in the five structures that the foundation did not consider suitable for one-family living.

What Charleston has done for its characteristic "single" houses--which are turned toward enclosed gardens at the side, with the gabled, one-room-wide end facing the street--has not gone unnoticed by other cities of the South, which share its desire to stay committed to the past without sacrificing the future. There are similar historic foundations in Richmond, Savannah, Ga., Mobile, Ala., and Wilmington, N.C., and interest is keen in half a dozen other Southern cities.

Most notable of the Charleston imitators is Savannah, whose historic Pulaski Square-Jones Street area (13 acres of brick, high-stooped, iron-trimmed houses dating from 1842 to the 1860s) surpasses Ansonborough in scope. Here, as in Charleston, much of the thrill of restoration has come from little discoveries. Wayne Cunningham, a 28-year-old shipping agent, and his wife discovered a valuable Chippendale mirror in the shaft of an old dumbwaiter in their three-story house on Pulaski Square. And J. Reid Williamson Jr., 32-year-old executive director of the Historic Savannah Foundation, found that a structural addition on the back of his house on the same square covered a quaint 1840 garden wall of brick, and that several Victorian cornices concealed the original dormer windows. "It's greatly different from building a new house," says Williamson. "Working with the old materials--wood, brick and plaster--is a lot more fun than working with the new synthetic stuff. There's more of an emotional involvement. I can get more top people in the city to sit down and talk about restoration in the downtown area than about new industry or highways."

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