TRAVELING IN STYLE : SEDUCED BY MEMORY : Behind Its Historical Facades and Old World Manners, Charleston in Springtime Is a Sensualist’s Delight

I WAS BORN IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, IN THE month of September, at the height of the hurricane season, and all my life I’ve been partial to the moody, mercurial weather and poetically charged architecture that help define the city.

Being born in Charleston confers upon one more than an address: It’s a birthright, an identity forged from this matrix of saltwater, palmettos and urban antiquity, inseparable from one’s DNA--a complicated heritage, luminous and elegant, but also bloody and disaster-strewn. Charleston breeds a fierce devotion among its sons and daughters. In an age noted for transitoriness, Charlestonians stay put for generations, rooted, somehow, in this vortex of swift tidal rivers, light-stung marshes and deep languid shade. We have an intense pride of place, a conviction that, despite all the calamities that have befallen the city over the centuries, no other place on earth is quite so preferred by God.

You don’t have to be born in Charleston, though, to fall under its spell. Legions of visitors come here every year--about 5 million of them to the city and the surrounding area in 1991--and almost inevitably find themselves smitten by the city’s seductive blend of natural beauty, colorful history, European atmosphere and palpable tradition.

With 3,600 or so period buildings inside a 1,000-acre historic district, this water-girded principality owes its singular character to a blend of factors--a gilded colonial age and impoverished post-Civil War period, a tough and visionary preservationist policy and a contemporary economic and artistic renaissance. The mix of past and present makes for interesting temporal dislocations and a number of odd, appealing juxtapositions.

Charleston contains all the contradictions of a dream. And beneath its proper surface, it is really a sensualist’s domain--a Garden of Eden after the fall, something out of Baudelaire or Tennessee Williams. Charlestonians love to drink, party, let their hair down. “Even though we claim to disapprove of it,” opines one of my fellow natives, “debauchery’s really what we do best.” Charleston-born writer Blanche Boyd says that the city “smells like sex and cabbage.”

CHARLESTON WORKS ITS MAGIC ALL YEAR LONG, BUT THE CHARM INTENSIFIES IN spring. By late March or April, the air turns balmy. Visitors loll on old-fashioned benches in the White Point Gardens park along the Battery, watching the whimsical peregrinations of clouds. Tiger cats doze atop sun-warmed gateposts. Lavender wisteria twines around old iron fences. Gardens explode with color--vivid tulips, azaleas in hot lipstick shades, perennials in paint-box hues.

The city’s infinite permutations of light and color always dazzle me. As I walk around Charleston--a superb pedestrian’s city--my eye takes pictures, freezing frames constantly. Many of the best visual pleasures are long views and panoramas: the oak-lined boulevards, the rows of pastel houses; the High Battery, with its old sea wall and promenade, with a regatta’s worth of sailboats in the harbor beyond; a fanciful skyline that looks as though it has been cut out by a silhouettist’s scissors. But the vignettes are lovely, too: a fat stone Buddha meditating under a fern; a lacy iron gate; red geraniums in a marble urn; fountains splashing in the sunlight, presided over by cherubs or mythical fish.

Old peninsular Charleston, the historic center of the city, can be easily traversed on foot. Indeed, feet are the best means of transportation for the visitor (though bicycle and horse-drawn buggy are good options, too). Broad Street, which transects the lower part of the peninsula, is the original commercial artery of Charleston--the local version of Wall Street. Row upon row of stuccoed edifices house the city’s top law, real estate and financial firms. Old-fashioned lanterns take the place of modern street lights. Nearby Legare and Church streets are residential. Each has been called the most beautiful street in America. The difference between them is largely one of scale. The houses on Legare are mansions, really, set on huge lots that were laid out in the original 17th-Century “Grand Modell” of the city. The houses on Church are smaller and generally quainter, with tiny, perfect gardens tucked behind them. The maze of small alleys and lanes behind these streets is worth wandering through, too. Three of my favorites are Longitude Lane, Stoll’s Alley and Zigzag Alley, each chockablock with small visual surprises.

IF FOR VISITORS CHARLESTON IS A LIVING MUSEUM, THEN FOR NATIVES IT’S A living biography. As a Charlestonian, you navigate across a web of memory, history and blood connections. Children whose great-grandparents played together also play together. Families intermarry, genes do a tumble; a chin is replicated here, a nose there. Even names, especially the aristocratic French Huguenot ones, get scrambled around and reused. At a party you might meet Legare Gaillard--or Gaillard Legare.

Manners, pedigree and continuity still count for something in Charleston. While others may worry about being Politically Correct, in Charleston it still matters to be Socially Correct. Invitations are often hand-delivered and calling cards are still used. Even small children, at least those living in the fashionable S.O.B. (South of Broad Street) neighborhood, have them--festooned with ducks or clowns. Full-length white gloves are de rigueur for exclusive annual balls like the Saint Cecilia, where invitations are based on birth, not worth. In other places, people meeting for the first time might ask, “What do you do?” But in Charleston they still inquire, “What was your grandmother’s maiden name?”

Charleston’s obsession with the past hasn’t necessarily ruled out improvements in the quality of contemporary life, however. Since 1975, the city has been led by a progressive and popular Democratic mayor, Joe Riley Jr., under whom the economy has prospered and the preservation movement has expanded. Though the local power base has traditionally been white, racial strife is relatively rare in Charleston. Charleston also has a wildly popular police chief, Reuben Greenberg, nationally known for his tough stance on crime. Greenberg, who sometimes patrols the city streets on roller skates, is believed to be the only police chief in the nation who’s both black and Jewish.

WITH THEIR CHARACTERISTIC BLEND OF HUMOR AND GRANDIOSITY, Charlestonians like to say that their city is situated at the spot where two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, join to form the Atlantic Ocean. The city began as a tiny fort in the Carolina wilderness, settled in 1670 by a band of 148 English colonists. The colony prevailed over smallpox, yellow fever, fire, marauding pirates and unfriendly Indians and Spanish settlers. (Charleston did not suffer pirates gladly: About 50 of them were hanged here in 1718 alone.) Charleston so flourished that it became perhaps the wealthiest and most sophisticated city in the Northern Hemisphere. It was even known as “Little London.” The first opera ever heard on these shores was performed in Charleston, in 1735. The colony was also the site of America’s first municipal college and what was probably its first public library.

As a result of its prosperity, Charlestonians began to build. The wealthy merchant class erected stately year-round homes; planters constructed lavish summertime residences in town, where they retreated from their upriver plantations during the hot, malarial summers. The mix of settlers--English, French Huguenot, Irish, Sephardic Jew, English Barbadian--contributed to the variety of architectural styles. So, too, has the steady diet of disasters (floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires) that has necssitated almost constant rebuilding and repairing. Today, in fact, many architectural styles are in evidence: Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Second Empire, Queen Anne, a smattering of Victorian.

Charleston’s contribution to American architecture is, however, the so-called “single house.” Tall and rectangular, the single house sits sideways on its lot with its narrow or gable end facing the street. Just a single room wide (though two or three deep) and bisected by a hall and stairs, the single house usually has long, tiered porches (called “piazzas” locally) on one side, the better to capture errant breezes.

The city’s golden age, unfortunately, came to a close not long after the Revolution. While the rest of the country turned increasingly industrial and abolitionist, Charleston clung stubbornly to the old order. As segregationists’ sentiments reached a boiling point, few Charlestonians dissented. One of the few who did was lawyer James Petigru, a staunch Unionist. Of the idea of secession he said: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”

In December, 1860, South Carolina did secede from the Union, and almost four months later, on April 12, 1861, the first shots of the Civil War were fired, right in Charleston harbor, when Confederate soldiers attacked Union troops at Ft. Sumter.

Although Charleston was spared Gen. Sherman’s torches, it was not spared much else. After the war (known euphemistically here for decades as “the late unpleasantness”), poverty, neglect and the detritus of bombardment were rampant. Houses fell apart; lots were overgrown with weeds. Defeated aristocrats accepted modest jobs or took in boarders to make ends meet. My own great-grandfather, himself a Civil War veteran in impoverished circumstances, gave away his treasured sword to a stranger, even more penurious than he, to pawn or sell for something to eat. Charlestonians of the era were said to be “too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash,” and so the city took on a dilapidated look.

Scarcely 23 years after the Civil War, Mother Nature dealt Charleston another catastrophic blow. An earthquake, the worst ever recorded east of the Mississippi, at an estimated 6.6 on the Richter scale, struck one steamy August night in 1886, killing 60 people and collapsing walls, porticoes, steeples and whole buildings. Charleston once again set about the business of repairing, salvaging and restoring.

Ironically, it was poverty and tough times that preserved Charleston’s architectural heritage. While the rest of the country headed into the 20th Century, razing structures to make way for brick boxes, glass cubes and skyscrapers, Charleston remained too poor to tear down its past.

In the 1920s, Charleston houses faced a new threat: Museums and private collectors from elsewhere began buying up mantle pieces, doors, balconies, even whole rooms, carting them off for reassembly and display. Charlestonians’ reactions to this architectural looting prompted the beginnings of the modern-day preservation movement. In 1931, the city passed the nation’s first zoning laws and designated part of the city as an Old and Historic District.

And in 1947, the Historic Charleston Foundation was established to rescue significant old buildings and resell them to preservation-minded buyers. Every spring, the foundation holds a monthlong Festival of Houses, opening some of the city’s most distinguished private homes and gardens to the public--a great chance for the visitor to catch a glimpse of Charleston from the inside. Another way to steal a look into the heart of Charleston is to stay in one of the city’s many small inns. There are about 100 of these scattered around town, some occupying historic homes, others behind main houses in the old dependent buildings known as kitchen houses or carriage houses.

Charleston’s profusion of handsome old houses was one of the things that attracted Pulitzer Prize-winning Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti (“Amahl and the Night Visitors”) to the city. In 1977, Menotti chose Charleston as the site for his Spoleto Festival U.S.A., which presents top ballet, theater, jazz and other performances each May, as a New World parallel to the older, similar festival in Spoleto, Italy.

ON SEPT. 21, 1989, HURRICANE HUGO SLAMMED INTO the Carolina coast, cutting a broad and deadly swath through the Charleston area, claiming nine lives, leveling 3,785 homes and damaging hundreds of thousands more. Losses amounted to about $3.7 billion. It was the worst and most expensive natural disaster in South Carolina history.

Experienced at rising from the ashes, though, Charleston was quick on the rebound. Today you’d never know that Hugo had passed through. If anything, the hurricane spawned a frenzy of repair and revitalization, and now brass shines, paint is fresh, gardens are restored and roofs are watertight. Charleston has never looked better.

GUIDEBOOK: Charleston, Charleston

Prices: Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only, except where otherwise noted.

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Charleston, but Delta flies nonstop from LAX to Atlanta six times a day, and from Ontario to Atlanta once daily, with frequent daily nonstop service between Atlanta and Charleston (about a one-hour flight).

Where to stay: Among the most romantic of Charleston’s inns is the Battery Carriage House, 20 S. Battery, (800) 775-5575, part of an antebellum mansion that dates from 1843. Rates: $99-$169. The John Rutledge House Inn, 116 Broad St., (800) 476-9741, was built as a private home in 1763 and was visited by George Washington in 1791. Rates: $109-$169. Historic Charleston Bed and Breakfast, (803) 722-6606, reserves rooms in historic homes and carriage houses.

Where to eat: Charleston has a distinguished culinary tradition. One restaurant popular for its typical local cooking is Magnolia’s, 185 E. Bay St., (803) 577-7771. This is on the site of the city’s original Customs House, and the restaurant’s signature dish is spicy shrimp and sausage over creamy white grits with tasso gravy; $40-$60. Another good choice is Carolina’s, 10 Exchange St., (803) 724-3800, featuring modern Carolina cuisine, such as black-eyed pea cakes, grouper with golden grits and peanut-brittle basket filled with ice cream and berries; $35-$50. Robert’s, 112 N. Market St., (800) 729-0094, is an award-winning restaurant where chef/opera singer Robert Dickson offers both good food and operatic singing. There is one seating nightly, at 8 p.m, and the restaurant serves only a six-course dinner for $70 per person, including wines. Reservations should be made well in advance.

What to do: The Historic Charleston Foundation’s Festival of Houses takes place this year from March 19 to April 17. For further information, contact the foundation at P.O. Box 1120, Charleston, S.C. 29402, (803) 723-1623. The Spoleto Festival U.S.A. will be held from May 28 to June 13 this year. Programs and ticket information are available from P.O. Box 704, Charleston, S.C. 29402, (803) 722-2764.

Recommended reading: “The Complete Walking Tour of Historic Charleston” by Nita Swann (Charleston Publishing Co., $3.95), available at the Visitors Bureau and local bookstores.

For further information: An information-packed guidebook, nearly 100 pages long, is available free from the Charleston Trident Convention & Visitors Bureau. Write to the bureau at P.O. Box 975, Charleston, S.C. 29402, or call (803) 853-8000.