I Dreamed Of Charleston
A Photo Essay on The Holy City
This is the first entry in a series documenting the beauty, quirks and fabric of great cities & towns. It’s meant as an observational journal to document my thoughts and perspective on a given place, as well as a tangible guide to what good urbanism looks like in the real world.
Almost two years ago, I went to Charleston for the first time. It was a place I had thought about constantly. Growing up in suburban New York, I was starved for walkable places with high quality architecture. Whenever I went into the city, I always found myself gravitating towards The West Village & North Shore Brooklyn — neighborhoods with fantastic urbanism and historic architecture, and equally fantastic prices to match. On weekends, I would visit towns across the Northeast searching to satisfy what I was looking for, but found only quaint one or two street towns that couldn’t be described as viable places to live for broad swathes of the population. Searching. But not finding. Did the place I was looking for exist? Or was it just a dream?
I went to school in the South. I’d heard whispers of people who had been to the place I was searching for, and even a bold few who claimed to have been from there. It’s a real city you can walk all around with some of the best food in America, they claimed. No, It’s not just one row of Potemkin homes…
