Cabbage Row, 89 and 91 Church Street, sits across from you, a pair of antebellum buildings that became the inspiration for one of the most celebrated works in American cultural history. After the Civil War, these former townhouses deteriorated into tenement housing occupied by poor Black Charlestonians who sold vegetables and other goods from their windows and stoops, giving the block its nickname. In 1925, a young white Charleston writer named DuBose Heyward published Porgy, a novel about a disabled Black street vendor named Porgy living in a fictional Catfish Row — drawn directly from this block.
The novel portrayed the Black community of Charleston with an unusual degree of sympathy and complexity for its time, capturing the Gullah dialect, the communal life, the violence and tenderness of poverty. In 1934, George Gershwin traveled to Charleston and spent the summer on Folly Beach studying Gullah music, attending church services, and absorbing the sounds that would become Porgy and Bess, his 1935 folk opera. Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the great American operas.
Its roots are here, on this block, in the lives of Black Charlestonians whose names have mostly been forgotten but whose voices shaped American music in ways that still resonate worldwide.