Charleston: A Historic Walking Tour (Images of America)

From its earliest days as a burgeoning colonial port blending European, Caribbean, and Asian influences, Charleston has maintained a unique brand of southern cosmopolitanism. Charleston Style: Past and Present traces the city's allure through its exquisite and sometimes eccentric architecture, decorative arts, and garden designs, which express a wide range of European and American styles, including Georgian, Federal, Chinese Chippendale, Gothic and Greek Revival, Queen Anne, Eastlake, and more. Author Susan Sully explores Charleston as a medium through which this spectrum of styles becomes transmuted into a distinctive regional mode.

Sully's Charleston is a place where antique and modern, fantasy and reality, playfully intersect. During its ascendance as one of America's wealthiest cities, Charleston's most privileged citizens acquired sophisticated, even decadent, tastes that continue to infuse their homes and gardens. After the Civil War, hardship, pride, and nostalgia shaped an aesthetic in which peeling gilt and tattered lace became badges of honor. Thanks to one of the earliest and most energetic American preservationist movements, the past extends into the present in Charleston, and the city's spaces reveal its complex spirit.

Charleston Style: Past and Present features nineteen residences ranging from archetypally gracious antebellum mansions to cottagelike dependencies to the iconic Charleston "single houses," with their sweeping piazzas, high ceilings, and tall windows. Also featured are some of the city's most charming gardens, inspired by the formal and picturesque landscape designs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe as well as by the exotic gardens of Japan. With rich color photography by John Blais and a delightful foreword by acclaimed novelist, Josephine Humphreys, Charleston Style: Past and Present delivers an evocative portrait of this fascinating city.

Enter Miss Susan Pringle Frost. Born in 1873 to a very old Charleston family that became impoverished after the Civil War, Pringle Frost was a woman way ahead of her time. She was able break away from the ties that bound traditional Victorian women and to move into a more modern age. Having never married, she first went to work as a court stenographer in 1901--a time when women weren't accepted into the workplace. She eventually went into real estate and became the first woman realtor in Charleston. She was a firm believer in civil rights when it was an unpopular stand in the south. She got involved in the suffrage movement, and hitched her star to Alice Paul. The skills that she learned during the suffrage battles, she used to great effect to get the preservation movement started. She badgered public officials, she recruited followers, she begged loans from bankers, and she was the key motivator in founding the Preservation Society of Charleston--still the premier preservation society in the city. Even before the PSC was founded, she single-handedly contributed to preservation efforts by purchasing run down homes in once properous neighborhoods and restoring them at her own expense. When the city wanted to tear down the homes that make up the now famous Rainbow Row and build something modern, Miss Susan purchased six of them and saved the entire block from the wrecking ball. Without Pringle Frost, Charleston would not be the charming city that attracts millions of tourists each year. Her contributions to the city of Charleston are so very impressive and author Sidney Bland does a fine job of bringing this story to life.

From its earliest days as a burgeoning colonial port blending European, Caribbean, and Asian influences, Charleston has maintained a unique brand of southern cosmopolitanism. Charleston Style, Then and Now, a condensed edition of the bestselling Charleston Style: Past and Present, traces the city's allure through its exquisite and sometimes eccentric architecture, decorative arts, and garden designs, which express a wide range of European and American styles, including Georgian, Federal, Chinese, Chippendale, Gothic and Greek Revival, Queen Anne, Eastlake, and more. Author Susan Sully explores Charleston as a medium through which this spectrum of styles becomes transmuted into a distinctive regional mode.

Sully's Charleston is a place where antique and modern, fantasy and reality, playfully intersect. During Charleston's ascendance as one of America's wealthiest cities, its most privileged citizens acquired sophisticated, even decadent, tastes that continue to infuse their homes and gardens. After the Civil War, hardship, pride, and nostalgia shaped an aesthetic in which peeling gilt and tattered lace became badges of honor. Thanks to one of the earliest and most energetic American preservationist movements, the past extends into the present in Charleston, and the city's spaces reveal its complex spirit.

Charleston Style, Then and Now features fourteen residences ranging from archetypally gracious antebellum mansions to cottage-like dependencies to the iconic Charleston "single houses," with their sweeping piazzas, high ceilings, and tall windows. Also featured are some of the city's most charming gardens, inspired by the formal and picturesque landscape designs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe as well as by the exotic gardens of Japan. With rich color photography by John Blais and a delightful foreword by acclaimed novelist Josephine Humphreys, Charleston Style, Then and Now delivers an evocative portrait of this fascinating city.