Charleston

Day 1 · ~1.7 km

1. 

   1

   Rainbow Row

   Thirteen pastel merchant houses whose colours date from a 1930s restoration, not from the 18th century

   Morning · 15 min · free

   Photograph the run of pastel houses from across East Bay in the morning, when the light is on the fronts.

2. 

   2

   Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon

   A colonial custom house over a British prison cellar, and the ground where enslaved people were sold

   Any time · 45 min · $$

   Go down into the dungeon beneath the Exchange, where the British jailed Charleston patriots during the Revolution, then read what happened on the ground above.

3. 

   3

   Tradd Street

   Piazzas, garden walls and the plainest version of the Charleston single house, street after street

   Morning · 30 min · free

   Walk it slowly for the houses rather than any one address: piazzas, garden walls and the plain single house, block after block, mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century.

4. 

   4

   Nathaniel Russell House

   A merchant's house built on rice and the slave trade, with a free-flying stair that holds up nothing

   Midday · 60 min · $$

   Go for the staircase and nothing else, then let the rest of the house happen around it. It is elliptical, free-flying, three storeys, and each cantilevered step holds the one above and below it — there is no column, no visible support, and people call it a spiral, which it is not.

5. 

   5

   Williams Mansion

   The Gilded Age pile of 35 rooms, the largest single-family house on the peninsula

   Any time · 30 min · $$

   Look at it from Meeting Street and read the scale rather than the detail: this is the largest single-family house in the city, and the point is that one merchant could build it.

6. 

   6

   Edmondston-Alston House

   The piazza from which the shelling of Fort Sumter was watched

   Any time · 45 min · $$

   Get out onto the piazza and look at the harbour. Fort Sumter is out there across the water, and by tradition this is where General Beauregard stood to watch the first shells fall on it in April 1861.

7. 

   7

   The High Battery

   The raised seawall promenade, built to keep the harbour out and now the best walk in the city

   Morning · 30 min · free

   Get up onto the wall itself rather than walking the street below it; the raised walk is the whole point and it runs from the corner at White Point Garden along the harbour.

8. 

   8

   White Point Garden

   War memorials under live oaks at the peninsula tip, where the city hanged the pirate Stede Bonnet in 1718

   Midday · 30 min · free

   Cut through under the live oaks at the tip of the peninsula, where the two seawalls meet, and use it as the hinge between the High Battery and Murray Boulevard rather than as a destination.