Charleston Rainbow Row Houses

by Norma Brandsberg

Title

Charleston Rainbow Row Houses

Artist

Norma Brandsberg

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Rainbow Row is the name for a series of thirteen colorful historic houses in Charleston, South Carolina. The name Rainbow Row was coined after the pastel colors they were painted as they were restored in the 1930s and 1940s. I can't tbegin to tell you the number of times I tried to phototgraph these colorful, historic homes with cars parked on both sides of the street, hiding what I wanted to photograph. Finally I got my chance!

Rainbow Row originally fronted directly on the riverfront of the Cooper River, but that land was subsequently filled in. Merchants constructed commercial buildings with stores on the first (ground) floor and living quarters above. Most of the buildings had no interior access between the first and second floors; exterior stairs were located in the yards behind the houses.

After the Civil War, this area of Charleston devolved into near slum conditions. In the 1920s, Susan Pringle Frost, the founder of the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, now the Preservation Society of Charleston, bought six of the buildings, but she lacked the money to restore them immediately. In 1931, Dorothy Haskell Porcher Legge purchased a section of these, house and began to renovate them. She chose to paint these houses pink based on a colonial Caribbean color scheme. Other owners and future owners followed suit, creating the "rainbow" of pastel colors present today. The coloring of the houses helped keep the houses cool inside as well as give the area its name. By 1945, most of the houses had been restored.

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Uploaded

November 27th, 2022

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