Artist Edward Hopper painted his 1929 watercolor titled Charleston Slum just a few years before the push for public housing recalled by Mamie Fields in her memoir, Lemon Swamp (p. 194-6).
“Charleston Slum” by Edward Hopper
The initiative began in 1934 with a federal survey of slums in 64 American cities, and Fields served as one of eight African-American women selected to “go through the neighborhoods where, supposedly, you mustn’t go, like “the Rotten Borough” and “Cool Blow.” When the Department of the Interior published its findings, “Charleston ranked lowest among the cities in dwellings without indoor toilets (almost forty-nine percent).” The city soon formed the Charleston Housing Authority under Mayor Burnett Maybank (in 1935).
Rent Collector – House on Cromwell Alley
Charleston’s early twentieth century story was a tale of two cities. Struggling with poverty and deteriorated housing on the one hand, “by 1939 tourism was Charleston’s second largest industry. Annual visitors to the city had steadily increased from 32,000 in 1926 to 300,000 in 1939,” according to a National Register of Historic Places document.
And in the middle of the city of tourism, a slum described by the Historic American Buildings Survey as “the worst disease breeding spot in the lower section of the city. Its existence was a constant police problem and fire hazard. Its crowded poorly lighted, evil smelling tenements depreciated the entire section of the city.” After slum clearance that vile location became the diamond in the Charleston Housing Authority’s tiara. Named for the famous South Carolina architect who designed the Washington Monument, Robert Mills Manor showcased work by renowned landscape architect Loutrel Briggs and the prominent architectural team of Simons & Lapham.
Robert Mills Manor (Then)
“The project consisted of two-story brick buildings with tile roofs. Each entrance featured a copper canopy supported by decorative wrought iron supports. Robert Mills Manor became recognized as one of the outstanding projects in the United States,” according to the same National Register report. Some 80 Black families had been displaced to make room for 140 apartments which opened in October 1939 for exclusive occupancy by Whites. The same Historic American Buildings Survey recounts a 1946 interview where Executive Director Edward Clement explained the Housing Authority’s race policies: “Unfortunately, negro family compositions do not meet with the authority’s requirements in many cases.” Robert Mills remained White-only until “the Housing Authority quietly integrated in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Robert Mills Manor (Now)
Continuing my research, I discovered a relatively recent op-ed by Steve Bailey in the 9/19/2016 Post and Courier, Take Wrecking Ball to Antiquated Local Housing Projects. “As Charleston has been transformed, the projects have become relics, frozen in time, not serving their African American residents but isolating them from their own city, generation after generation…Shame on us if we can do no better,” Bailey wrote.
Bailey’s article transported me back to 1983 when I entered business school at UNC Chapel Hill. Our first-year MBA class received a Harvard case study about Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project. The high-rise ghetto had major problems then, including vandalism, drugs, and violent crime.
Cabrini-Green’s two high rise buildings (ca. 1958 and 1962) housed 3,020 families. Tired of dealing with problems, Mayor Richard Daley promised to tear them down and start over. So, between 1995 and 2011 the Chicago Housing Authority tore the whole project down in stages. According to Cabrini-Green: A History of Broken Promises (12/15/2021), “By the time the transformation of Cabrini-Green is completed, taxpayers will have spent $2 billion on new homes, parks and schools. The decades-long transformation has turned the once-predominantly Black neighborhood into an upscale, mostly white one.”
Marine Hospital Designed by Robert Mills (Charleston Housing Auth. Offices Now)
Public housing programs kicked off about the same time in Chicago and Charleston (the 1930’s). About five years after Bailey’s 2016 opinion article, Charleston’s Authority announced big plans. “All Public Housing in Charleston to be Replaced or Renovated in Sweeping Initiative,” the 5/11/2021 Post & Courier headline read.
The land surrounding all of Charleston’s public housing has appreciated enormously in value. On the city’s East Side and in the Meeting Street corridor, gentrification has ushered in a new skyline dominated by multi-story, market-rate apartment buildings which continue popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain. For years the City has required developers to include some rent-controlled “workforce” apartments to gain project approval, but the net result of surging development has been a mass outmigration from historically Black neighborhoods.
Author at Cromwell Alley Robert Mills Manor
The Authority must sense the time has come for something “sweeping.” Robert Mills and Cooper River Manor will be renovated. Other complexes will face the wrecking ball. Meanwhile Charleston still reads like a tale of two cities, depression era public housing surrounded by posh development. And no matter what the Housing Authority hopes to do, there’s Cabrini-Green to remember. The lessons of that public housing albatross hang around the necks of every housing authority decision maker in the nation. Because Cabrini-Green has already shown it’s not so easy to “tear it down and start over” when it comes to public housing.