Robert Caro in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, details how Mr. Moses, in Depression-era New York City, was able to create and lead a powerful matrix of public authorities tasked with infrastructure construction. Through these quasi-public agencies, Mr. Moses was able to circumvent the “power of the purse” assigned to public officials, as well as the process of public comment, and tap a complicated array of funding sources, from bonds to tolls, in order to construct roads, “parkways,” bridges, and public facilities. His great political skills resulted in the construction of many of New York’s significant bridges, parks, housing, and roads, often funded by shifting resources away from public transit. His public works, parks, and housing were durable marvels of engineering, landscape, and architecture. Many continue to serve hundreds of thousands in the New York region. Had his vision been more broadly based, mass transit would have also seen a significant investment rather than suffer through many years of maintenance issues and neglect.
Mr. Moses shared his strategies and methodologies across the country. Many other cities and states followed his lead, using these concepts in a manner that would generally establish the pattern of sprawling suburban development, the demise of a public transportation network, and the groundwork for the rise of the now-dominant car culture. His power was unrivaled until his mindset of development led to the demolition of Pennsylvania Station. The resulting public outcry emboldened advocates, like Greenwich Village resident Jane Jacob, to stop the era of grand projects such as the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have leveled that historic neighborhood.
Today’s scarcity of resources for public works – some might say attributable to a certain lack of political will – once again requires the Mayor to have a vision to meet needs associated with aging infrastructure and rampant population growth. A kneecap-breaking version, like that of Robert Moses, is no longer viable; but, an ability to negotiate and cajole the funding minefield will certainly be necessary.
This vision will need to balance Charleston’s provincial appeal with some real urban challenges. Existing transportation corridors will need to serve many more modes of getting around, including train, mass transit (bus, ferry, light rail, trolley, etc.), car, pedestrian and bicycle. Storm water management and other utility service infrastructure will need to be integrated with considerations of climate change, population growth, and the potential of events such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Plans for resiliency, such as this one for Brooklyn, NY, and Gabe Klein’s recent transportation plan for Charleston represent good frameworks that can provide the region with the means to address critical needs well into the future.
The two words that best seem to describe West Ashley over the past two decades are “Left Out”. While Peninsula Charleston has enjoyed constant, pro-active attention to every detail of what makes it a livable and attractive community, no one has spent much time applying those same livability and attraction concepts to West Ashley.
On the peninsula, documenting the community and architectural history of that part of the city is almost second nature. Great concern is shown daily for preserving the harmony of neighborhood uses and for preserving the architectural appearance, scale and proportion of buildings within the neighborhoods. Nothing changes much at the street level without the input of neighborhood association representatives and the public. There is a delicate balance that is maintained at all cost between the rights of residents and the wishes of commercial interest in downtown Charleston; but when you cross the river into West Ashley, all that goes right out the window!
On the west side of the river the public policy focus almost immediately shifts to the all-important commercial corridors and their commercial uses…and the more intense the uses, the better. It is the rare occasion when West Ashley residents will take a stand against the City’s top-down policy of announcing to residents what the City is going to do to our neighborhoods, rather than allowing West Ashley residents to have meaningful input into what is best for West Ashley. The Turky’s Towing case was a prime example of this. The silver lining of that case was that West Ashley woke up and finally said no!
Now that people are beginning to pay attention to West Ashley, it’s time to look more closely at how we got to where we are and how we can hopefully get to a better place. West Ashley’s symptoms must be dealt with holistically if we are to reverse the suburban decay of our community. We must re-assert our own identity and begin dealing simultaneously with our zoning issues, community image, stalled neighborhood revitalization efforts, lack of affordable housing, transportation challenges, public facilities development, and the improvement of our public lands and their interconnectivity.
One of the first things that we must do for our community is to document and make available to our residents the wonderful history of this place that we call home. For the most part, residents of West Ashley are completely ignorant of its history. The fundamental problem with that fact is that people do not tend to take pride in things that mean nothing to them. Knowing our history will help us to do things like developing appropriate design guidelines for new construction that reflect who we are as a people and where we have come from as a community. Late Victorian and early 20th century wood frame farm buildings and railroad structures comprised much of our older built environment West of the Ashley. We should draw from those historic forms as we build up our community. It’s our identity and we need to reclaim it. Without our history being easily accessible to our people, the land between the Ashley and the Stono will never be fully appreciated and we will have no community identity.
During the last Historic Resources Survey of Charleston County, the decision was made to leave West Ashley out of the project. Twenty years later when historic structures began to be threatened with demolition, the demolitions were granted because the structures didn’t “show up on any historic inventories”. This is not a case of the buildings not being historic; it’s a case of them not being documented; it’s a case of nobody caring enough to record the history. This must be corrected.
There are literally thousands and thousands of pages of historic documents in the State Archives that record the history of West Ashley, or St. Andrews as the area has been historically known since the eighteenth century. The problem is that only a tiny handful of these documents have ever been scanned into the system where the public can obtain easy access via the internet.
We don’t know our history because our history is in a vault in Columbia and we have to drive 120 miles to see it. We should find a way to get these documents scanned and made available and we should be intentional about familiarizing people with what we find in our research. West Ashley’s full participation in the County’s Historic Resources Survey during 2015 and 2016 is a must.
The two jurisdictions that control land use in the West Ashley area, the City of Charleston and Charleston County, have never been able to finalize and adopt common community standards for the appropriate level of intensity of commercial uses along the West Ashley commercial corridors. The City and the County must adopt mutually agreed upon and jointly approved zoning overlay districts for all commercial corridors to prevent the further degradation of our adjoining neighborhoods. This is how we will prevent another massive storage facility like the one on St. Andrews Blvd. and how we will stop the proliferation of automobile dealerships on Savannah Highway.
We have frequently missed the opportunity to attract and retain affordable housing and neighborhood-focused commercial uses in these corridors like the drug stores, grocery stores, restaurants, department stores and other neighborhood supportive businesses that were once here, but which have now been supplanted by automobile dealerships that do little to serve the daily needs of West Ashley residents.
Code enforcement must be intensified. The best way to protect our tax base and keep our tax rates low is to have a strong code enforcement program in both the City and the County. A proactive property maintenance program is essential for private properties as well as public rights of way. There are sidewalks in the West Ashley area that are impassable because obstructions as large as palm trees have grown up in the cracks between the slabs. Buildings like the Kerr Drug building at Wappoo Rd. have not been cleaned or maintained in more than a decade. Large properties like Church Creek Shopping Center and Charleston Hardware continue to go vacant and threaten their adjoining neighborhoods with all the problems that come with vacant commercial buildings. We need more muscle and we don’t yet have it.
Less affluent neighborhoods with “good bones” like Ardmore have the ability to provide significant affordable housing in an area that desperately needs it. The problem is that people are scared to invest in areas where the only City Department with any visibility in the neighborhood is the Police Department.
That’s just not good enough. We need to press a little shoe leather to the pavement, define the problem properties in these areas that drive residents away and use all of our resources to clean these neighborhoods up and keep them that way. A thorough vacant land survey of these areas would be helpful. Low interest loans for new infill construction in these areas would be a great collaborative project with the Community Loan Fund.. Development of public land in these areas and others for affordable housing could give struggling families a leg up at a time when there has been little relief for the middle class.
Public transportation may seem limited to buses for now, but might we consider using small rubber tire trolleys, somewhat like elongated golf carts, on the old ACL and SAL rights of way that could shuttle residents from South Windermere all the way to the Clemson Extension with the historic crossing at DuPont, where passengers could change “trolleys” for Maryville. These vehicles would be more like elongated golf carts and would not interfere with the pedestrian and bicycle traffic. This would also help get bus traffic off Savannah Highway and other major corridors.
There will be almost a million people living in the tri-county area by 2030. We will need higher density housing and West Ashley is one of the logical places for it to go. Higher density residential and office development could easily be built at Croghan and Citadel Mall that would provide both ridership and commercial destinations for the trolleys at opposite ends of the Greenway.
New public facilities have been built West of the Ashley in recent years, but predominantly in conjunction with new construction on the periphery of the city. This is fine for attracting people to the new neighborhoods in the farthest reaches of the suburbs, but it does nothing for the older West Ashley neighborhoods which have never had these advantages. We need to go back and right some planning wrongs that have occurred here in the past fifty years.
We have parks, playgrounds, The Bike Path, and the Greenway in the older areas, but how much better would they be if these facilities were interconnected? The city has a perfect opportunity to create synergy from these assets at the Firefighter’s Memorial and the soon to be purchased 1901 Savannah Highway property.
The Firefighter’s Memorial in its present condition is an embarrassment. The families of the firefighters and the public deserve better and we should not be afraid to explore how to make that property something worthy of the lives it memorializes. Allowing this property to become a publicly sponsored West Ashley eyesore is unacceptable.
It appears that the city will be building a new fire station on the 1901 Savannah Highway property and that the rear of that property might become a neighborhood park. Why not make a portion of the entire Savannah Highway property a passive destination for those who use the Greenway and the Bike Path? There are people who now park their cars on the shoulders of our neighborhood streets to use the Greenway. Having a totally unused city-owned parking lot at the memorial property and not encouraging people to use it is a missed opportunity. Why not incorporate restrooms and a water fountain for the people who use the Greenway and the Bike Path into the design of the new fire station?
An improved crosswalk and landscaped median at Wappoo Road similar to the one just completed in Avondale, would make this dangerous intersection safe for the school children who cross there as well as for the people who might want to connect from the Bike Path to the Greenway.
One public facility that the residents of West Ashley have been asking for is a farmer’s market. Somewhere in the DuPont area, where all of these properties come together, is the logical place for a new farmer’s market to happen. Combining the farmer’s market with neighborhood meeting space and a small performance/exhibit space would keep the property occupied and functioning as a vibrant center of neighborhood activity. Music and arts programs could easily be run from such a facility. Perhaps when Stono Park School is replaced, the auditorium and classrooms could be repurposed for some of these neighborhood activities. It is a small manageable property.
West Ashley’s problems did not come about overnight and cannot be resolved in any piecemeal way. We have taken a long time to reach this “Critical Mess” and it’s time for us to decide who and what we want to be in West Ashley and how we are going to make it happen. What a great opportunity for all of us!