Broad piazzas and elaborate ironwork gates line the South of Broad neighborhood around you, one of the most intact antebellum districts in the United States. The grand houses you see around you — with their broad piazzas facing the prevailing sea breeze, their elaborate ironwork gates, and their walled gardens — were built by planters, merchants, and lawyers who grew extraordinarily wealthy on the labor of enslaved people. Charleston's distinctive "single house" style, one room wide with the narrow end facing the street, allowed maximum ventilation in the subtropical heat and maximum privacy from the city's crowded streets.
Each of these homes once contained an entire domestic economy: enslaved cooks, coachmen, laundresses, seamstresses, nurses, and gardeners who made the elegant lives of white Charlestonians possible. Their quarters were in the back — in carriage houses, above kitchens, in small outbuildings hidden from the street. When you admire the architecture here, you are also looking at the product of a forced labor system of almost unimaginable scale.
South of Broad is sometimes called the most beautiful neighborhood in America. It is also a place that cannot be fully understood without reckoning with what made it possible.