Between Two Rivers · Episode 10
Between Two Rivers
The series finale. Mayor Joe Riley's forty years, Spoleto comes to town, Hurricane Hugo comes ashore at midnight, Waterfront Park and the pineapple fountain, the Ravenel Bridge, and Charleston today. And one last look out from the tip of the Battery, where the two rivers meet.
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Carol September 21st, 1989. Close to midnight. The wind over Charleston harbor is screaming.
Shannon And the eye of a hurricane is about to come ashore, right at the mouth of the harbor, at Sullivan's Island.
Carol Hurricane Hugo.
Shannon Welcome back to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Carol Last time, Charleston learned to save its old buildings, got a famous dance, and gave the world Porgy and Bess. This time, it's our last episode. The modern city, one more big storm, and how Charleston became the place it is today.
Shannon Episode ten. Between Two Rivers.
Shannon So let's start in the middle of the century. After the Second World War, Charleston was still a fairly quiet place. The Navy Yard was the biggest employer around, and it stayed that way until the Navy closed it in 1996. Downtown, a lot of the old houses were still shabby.
Carol But protected.
Shannon But protected, thanks to that 1931 law. And more and more people were starting to fix them up.
Carol And then the city got a new mayor.
Shannon Joseph P. Riley Junior. Elected in 1975. And he stayed mayor for forty years.
Carol Forty years!
Shannon Ten terms in a row. He's one of the longest-serving mayors in American history. And a lot of what you love about downtown Charleston today, he had a hand in.
Carol Like Spoleto.
Shannon Like Spoleto. In 1977, an Italian-American composer named Gian Carlo Menotti was looking for an American home for his summer arts festival. He already ran one in a small town in Italy called Spoleto.
Carol And he picked Charleston.
Shannon He picked Charleston. He wanted an old city with beautiful theaters and churches, small enough to walk around. Charleston had all of that.
Carol Including the Dock Street Theatre.
Shannon Including the Dock Street Theatre, from episode three. So every year now, in late May and early June, Spoleto Festival USA fills the city with opera, dance, theater, and music for a little over two weeks.
Carol And there's a little sister festival too.
Shannon Piccolo Spoleto. Smaller shows, local artists, lots of it free, run by the city itself. The whole city turns into a stage.
Carol And then, in 1989, Hugo.
Shannon Hugo was a monster. A Category Four hurricane, with winds around a hundred and forty miles an hour when it came ashore around midnight, the night of September 21st into the 22nd.
Carol And it came in right over the harbor.
Shannon The center came ashore just north of the city, and for a while Charleston sat right inside the eye. The storm surge was worst just up the coast, at McClellanville and Bulls Bay, where the water rose about twenty feet. But Charleston got plenty.
Carol What did the city look like the next morning?
Shannon Trees down everywhere. Roofs torn off. Water through the lower city. Even City Hall was damaged. Out on Sullivan's Island, houses had been knocked off their foundations, and the bridge to the island, the Ben Sawyer Bridge, had been twisted so that one end was down in the water.
Carol The island of the palmetto fort.
Shannon The same island. And north of the city, in the Francis Marion National Forest, the wind flattened whole forests of pine trees.
Carol And the old buildings downtown?
Shannon Damaged, many of them. But they'd been through the cyclone, the earthquake, and the war. They came through this too. And the city rebuilt, faster than anyone expected.
Carol And even with all that damage, the city kept building something new on the waterfront.
Shannon Waterfront Park. On the Cooper River, along the edge of the old city, where there used to be wharves and warehouses. It was already under construction when Hugo hit, and it opened the next spring, in 1990.
Carol With the pineapple fountain.
Shannon The pineapple fountain. The pineapple is an old symbol of welcome in Charleston. And on a hot summer day, you'll find kids splashing in it, and plenty of grown-ups too.
Carol I may have been one of those grown-ups.
Shannon (laughs) I won't tell anyone.
Carol And then there's the bridge.
Shannon The Ravenel Bridge. If you've seen a photo of modern Charleston, you've probably seen it. Those two tall towers with the cables fanning out, like the sails of a ship.
Carol Over the Cooper River.
Shannon Over the Cooper, from Charleston to Mount Pleasant. It opened in 2005, and replaced two old, narrow bridges that people were honestly scared to drive across.
Carol I remember those bridges.
Shannon Everybody who drove them remembers them. And the new one has a walking and bike path, so on any morning you'll see people running across it, high above the river, with the whole harbor spread out below.
Carol And from up there, you can see the whole story.
Shannon You really can. Fort Sumter. Sullivan's Island. The Battery. The steeples. All of it.
Carol So, Charleston today.
Shannon It's a very different city from the one we started with. Close to a hundred and sixty thousand people live in the city itself, and many more in the area around it. The port is one of the busiest on the East Coast. And millions of visitors come every year to walk the same streets we've been walking in this series.
Carol It's been named the best city in America to visit, year after year.
Shannon It does. And it has its challenges, too. The water is rising, and the lower city floods more and more often on high tides. Traffic. The cost of housing.
Carol But Charleston has been dealing with water for more than three hundred and fifty years.
Shannon That's true. It's a city between two rivers. Water has always been part of the deal.
Carol So, Shannon. Ten episodes. More than three hundred and fifty years.
Shannon From a ship coming up the Ashley River in 1670, to a bridge over the Cooper.
Carol A town that moved across a river. Pirates at the gate. A teenager and her indigo. Palmetto logs. All those steeples. The first shots of a war. Phosphate in the mud. The earthquake. A woman buying old houses one at a time.
Shannon And a city that kept getting knocked down, and kept getting back up.
Carol So, let's end where we began.
Shannon Stand at the tip of the Battery and look out at the water. On your left, the Cooper River. On your right, the Ashley.
Carol And a Charlestonian will tell you, with a perfectly straight face, that this is where the two rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean.
Shannon (laughs) And after ten episodes, I'm almost ready to believe it.
Carol That's Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time. Thank you so much for listening.
Shannon Thanks for walking these streets with us. And if you're ever in Charleston, go stand at the tip of the Battery. You'll know exactly where you are.
Carol From all of us at Voice Frequency, goodbye for now.