The imaginative reconstruction of the Dock Street Theatre, completed between 1935 and 1937 in Charleston, South Carolina, was a New Deal experiment in historic preservation. Funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and led by local architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham, the orchestrated re-creation of a lost eighteenth-century theater reflected the white elite’s desire to immortalize the city’s prosperous colonial and antebellum past in the historic built environment. While the project courted conservative interests and created a romanticized version of Old Charleston, the strong support of Democratic mayor Burnet Maybank and WPA director Harry L. Hopkins simultaneously pushed forward a progressive southern agenda. This dual and contradictory set of motivations culminated in an intriguing use of historic preservation to nurture a particular community’s sense of place and use historic buildings as a catalyst for cultural rebirth.

On November 26, 1937, five hundred audience members enjoyed the first performance in more than two centuries within the walls of Charleston’s Dock Street Theatre. The city’s Little Theatre acting troupe, the Footlight Players, reenacted the raucous, eighteenth-century Restoration comedy, The Recruiting Officer, which had opened the original colonial playhouse on February 12, 1736. During those intervening two hundred years, the space that housed the colonial establishment underwent a number of significant physical changes, with the modest theater disappearing entirely to be replaced by a larger set of conjoined buildings that served different functions over time. The Dock Street Theatre had succumbed to fire within its first few decades of operation, and a roaring antebellum hostelry, the Planters’ Hotel, stood in its place for much of the 1800s. After the Civil War, the resort fell into disrepair, a state in which the site remained until a new and embellished version of the Dock Street Theatre came to life as a New Deal work relief project. With political support from the City of Charleston and funding from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Charlestonians witnessed the rebirth of a long gone—but never forgotten—site of colonial prosperity and gaiety.

Dock Street Theatre/Planters’ Hotel façade, facing Church Street. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Dock Street Theatre/Planters’ Hotel façade, facing Church Street. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

Opening night of the Dock Street Theatre in 1937 signified the imaginative transformation of the dilapidated Planters’ Hotel into an architectural gem for Charlestonians to celebrate during the bleak years of the Depression. Although the exterior walls of the old hostelry looked the same, albeit given a facelift, its interior underwent a radical alteration as the hotel spaces were repurposed into a modern performance venue, inspired by the site’s former famed theater. In deciding to build anew the Dock Street Theatre, a potent symbol of Charleston’s prominence in the colonial period as a center of architectural expertise, furniture production, and industries tied to the slave trade and plantation slavery, elite white stakeholders could regain their cultural supremacy and celebrate the city’s historic character. By the twentieth century, Charleston’s cultural arbiters—members of hereditary organizations, old planter-class families, and prominent local artists, politicians and businesspeople—actively advocated for the preservation of the buildings and streetscapes of the prosperous colonial and antebellum eras as a way to cope with a difficult present and reassert their social and political power.1 Through the federally funded and locally orchestrated effort to remake the Dock Street Theatre, the cultural elite manufactured a powerful image of Charleston’s glorified past and reclaimed the city’s position as a regional center of art.

The resurrection of the Dock Street Theatre in the 1930s fit nicely into the portfolio of the Charleston Renaissance, a term used to describe the outpouring of artistic and literary work in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated local cultural achievements and reflected a profound appreciation of the city’s colonial and antebellum history, particularly its architectural heritage.2 Not coincidentally, the preservation community’s underlying objective to safeguard pre-Civil War structures corresponded with the popularity of this cultural movement. Efforts to preserve the city’s early architectural identity only gained momentum during the Depression and targeted the most historic section of the peninsula: the southernmost area, framed by the Ashley River to the west and the Cooper River to the east. The original Dock Street Theatre of the 1700s, which had stood at the intersection of Church and Queen streets, now occupied prime historic real estate. In the 1930s, it became the perfect site to promote an idealized image of the historic city through preservation activity. The theater projected a sanitized portrait of Old Charleston that promoted artistic and architectural excellence and downplayed or willfully ignored racial and class tensions.

At the same time, the theater’s revival became an important story in the larger narrative of Southern progressivism in the New Deal era. While the desire to construct a romanticized version of Charleston reflected a conservative attachment to a privileged past built upon a slave economy, the preservation endeavor also advanced the city’s Democratic Party’s agenda to revitalize the struggling port town. Upon completion of the new Dock Street Theatre, Douglas D. Ellington, the federal architectural consultant who oversaw the WPA’s construction work, praised the building’s potential to reestablish Charleston as an exciting and lucrative hub of American culture:

[The theatre is] ready to become an active instrument in the public life.…Operated in a full sense of idealistic obligation, it could become an instrument of more than local satisfaction, [it] could also be of national value and importance. It is not too extravagant to imagine that an actual cultural renaissance might have founding from within its walls. The building is not merely a theatre, but the planning and arrangement is such that it stands ready to function broadly as a cultural and artistic heart of the city.3

Charleston’s Democratic mayor at the time, Burnet Maybank, embraced the idea of the theater as a cultural focal point and used the federal project to push forward a modern partisan program. The young Mayor Maybank enjoyed the political and personal support of leading Democrats in Washington, including James Byrnes, South Carolina Senator and President Roosevelt’s close advisor, and Harry L. Hopkins, director of the WPA. As the Roosevelt administration allocated large sums of time and money to improving Southern states’ infrastructure through various New Deal initiatives, Maybank strategically capitalized on federal support. Throughout his tenure as mayor, he proposed projects that would improve Charleston’s economic and cultural arenas, as well as garner himself political power as he prepared for higher positions within the national Democratic Party. Undoubtedly, the mayor’s ambitious civic projects, including the theater, found success because he enjoyed the necessary support of party leaders, but he also inarguably courted Charleston’s patrician families.

The local impetus to restore the Dock Street Theatre, then, was double facing. In its attempt to recover the past to improve the present, the theater’s return to life represented aspirations for contemporary and future Charleston to be the historical destination of the South. At the same time, the project still perpetuated the region’s characteristic political and social conservatism. The preservation decisions made by the historical actors directing the project illustrate this ambitious agenda to both consolidate white power in the historic built environment and push Charleston to embrace some degree of change, such as accepting help from the federal government. Reflective of the fact that the goal of the theater project was not to faithfully and accurately reconstruct a modest colonial establishment but to shape the historical image of the city that would dominate the burgeoning and profitable tourism industry, the politicians and architects in charge made the most creative choices possible in terms of preservation methodology. Because the theater no longer existed, any iteration of a playhouse would, unquestionably, be a new build. Accordingly, the architects concocted an imaginative plan: they created a site with the façade of one building—the still-standing nineteenth-century Planters’ Hotel—behind which they placed a newly designed theater, inspired by a colonial venue that had long since vanished. Moreover, they outfitted the space with authentic historic architectural pieces salvaged from a nearby property, the Radcliffe-King House. In other words, a historic exterior clothed a fabricated interior featuring real artifacts. These intentional choices reveal the ultimate purpose of the preservation endeavor: to produce a believable but essentially fantastical reproduction of the eighteenth-century Dock Street Theatre that combined actual historic materials with new construction.

It is important to address the language of preservation used at the time of the project in the 1930s and throughout this article. Although most commonly called a “restoration” by historical actors, the effort would not be labeled such by contemporary preservationists.4 To modern-day eyes, the project most closely resembles adaptive use: it rehabilitated a collection of nineteenth-century buildings and constructed a colonial-inspired—but not historically accurate—theater. However, for proud, history-loving, white Charlestonians in the early twentieth century, re-creating the extinct colonial theater served to restore the cultural supremacy they had enjoyed before the Civil War; in essence, the word restoration cuts to the heart of the project to reclaim the authority elite stakeholders once held over all aspects of life in Charleston. For the federal government, which played the important role of financial benefactor, the revived theater presented an opportunity to showcase the wealthiest colonial Southern city’s cultural refinement, an inspiring reminder of affluence and gentility during current economic troubles. Therefore, this article maintains the use of the term “restore” to describe the preservation enterprise because the term was used by and captures the intentions of the project’s collaborators. Although the language is imprecise, the “restoration” ultimately should be considered a creative experiment in historic preservation to generate cultural renewal. Examined as such, the reemergence of the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston’s physical landscape exemplifies the power of the built environment to embody or reinforce prevailing mindsets while also promoting community growth. Although inherently looking to the past, as all preservation projects do, the Dock Street Theatre’s ceremonial return to the peninsula also embodied a forward-looking ambition to use historic architecture as a means to reassert control. In other words, the “restored” theater called on Charleston’s historic sense of place to serve both contemporary and future generations, becoming a tangible form of political and cultural agency.5

By shaping Charleston’s historic image—fancifully engineering the reappearance of the eighteenth-century Dock Street Theatre—members of patriotic and hereditary organizations, artists, and architects hoped to establish a visual literacy and dominant narrative of a rich colonial and antebellum city that would be recognizable both locally and nationwide. Through this popular New Deal work project, Charlestonians with a stake in maintaining control of their city’s cultural heritage issued a persuasive statement about how they wanted their history to be remembered. By employing creative adaptive use in which they selectively chose what history to honor and what to fabricate, they reinvented the architectural character of the southern city’s historic core. The Dock Street Theatre of the 1930s, evaluated as a historic preservation project, importantly expresses an entrenched conservativism while simultaneously defending preservation as an integral part of community revitalization. While the theater’s construction advanced Southern Democrats’ maneuverings to harness New Deal resources, it also allowed Charleston’s white elites to tangibly craft a palatable representation of the city as a nostalgic bastion of their past privileged lives. The political and art leaders responsible at the local level successfully redefined and cultivated a cultural identity of Charleston that would dominate historical white tourism in the twentieth century and beyond, indeed putting the past to work in service of the present and future.

The first Dock Street Theatre, constructed in 1736, sat on the southwest corner of Church and Queen streets.6 The original thoroughfare called Dock Street changed its name to Queen Street in 1734, and although the first advertisement in the South-Carolina Gazette referred to the new structure as the “New Theatre in Dock Street,” subsequent mid-eighteenth century notices called it the “Theater in Queen-Street,” “Play House,” or simply “the Theatre.”7 The modest playhouse enjoyed a robust first spring season, although it attracted a less elite clientele than comparative colonial sites of public entertainment in town, such as McCrady’s Tavern and the dining and entertainment venue Longroom. Despite its early success, the theater faced difficulties in subsequent years, changing ownership within six months and several more times before burning to the ground in 1754.8 In 1809, Alexander Calder and his wife, proprietors of the nearby Planters’ Hotel, purchased property from Major John Ward on the corner of Church and Queen streets where the Dock Street Theatre had stood in the previous century. The Calders relocated their popular hostelry less than a block to the east to the site of the old theater, and later remodeled and enlarged the establishment several times over the next couple of decades.9

The bustling activity of the Planters’ Hotel in the mid-nineteenth century contributed to what Eola Willis, amateur theater historian of Charleston, dubbed “the Jolly Corner” in her 1924 book The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century. As a founding member of the Preservation Society of Charleston and historian of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, Willis was deeply invested in celebrating the city’s ancestral heritage. While her magnum opus on the city’s early theater history should be approached as the work of an enthusiast rather than a professional, it helped perpetuate the myth of Old Charleston as a flourishing, sophisticated colonial capital and the heart of the antebellum South. At the intersection where the Planters’ Hotel reigned, Willis wrote, “gentlemen of the old regime met to discuss horses, politics, and the events of the times.”10 From year to year, wealthy planter families from the Carolina Upcountry and neighboring regions lodged at the busy hostelry for several weeks during the spring social season, and stagecoaches from Savannah and cities farther west started their return journeys from the hotel.11 It is likely that the property received a facelift during these prosperous years. John C. O’Hanlon assumed ownership of the hotel in 1852 and presumably adorned the place with its notable façade: rusticated brownstone columns, cast-iron balcony, and decorative mahogany brackets.12 In the next decade, the Planters’ Hotel took on added import when it served as a gathering hub and informal communications center during the Civil War.13

The Planters’ Hotel survived the destructive conflict, but never recovered its antebellum fame. By the 1880s, the handsome and once lively establishment had become neglected tenement housing for poor African Americans, and the complex continued to deteriorate in the early decades of the twentieth century.14 Nearby Cabbage Row (or “Catfish Row”) of Porgy and Bess fame suffered the same fate. The degeneration of the physical state and evolution from white to Black occupants of these two once-elite structures reflected the broader context of changing political and racial conditions following the war. Increasingly, legal segregation manifested in public and commercial spaces during the Jim Crow period, but private spaces also saw shifting demographics.15 Some areas of the historic core experienced disinvestment, a process represented by the worsening condition of the former Planters’ Hotel. Indeed, the once celebrated locale had altered so notably that in the 1930s, Thomas R. Waring, editor of the Charleston Evening Post and chairman of Charleston’s Board of Architectural Review, described the structure as “a gaunt and sometimes dangerous relic.”16 The corner of the city’s renowned colonial theater and later premier antebellum hostelry had become, in local opinion, an eyesore.

The Planters’ Hotel had become African American tenement housing by the 1880s. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, Sheet 12, Sanborn Map Company, May 1884. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Planters’ Hotel had become African American tenement housing by the 1880s. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, Sheet 12, Sanborn Map Company, May 1884. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

The material decline of the Planters’ Hotel was not altogether surprising, as the city steadily witnessed the loss of historic fabric amidst general economic hardships in the decades following the Civil War and well into the twentieth century. Charleston faced the challenges of a sluggish economy hit hard by the collapse of the cotton market, and a demoralized white society unable to foster a thriving business class to compete with other growing Southern cities such as Atlanta and Nashville. Moreover, by the 1890s, the growth of railroads in the South had undermined Charleston’s historic role as the chief port on the southern Atlantic coast.17 Partly in resistance to unwelcome changes brought by the profound collapse of the southern social and economic system built on slavery, the city’s wealthy white families nurtured a strongly conservative ethos. In the words of one historian, Charleston’s commitment to rigid societal standards solidified its role as the “social arbiter” of the state even when other aspects of life were overturned.18 Accordingly, planter-class families institutionalized their conservatism in the early twentieth century through the founding of local organizations which dictated the city’s cultural scene for decades. For example, the Charleston Art Commission (CAC) formed in 1910 as a challenge to the nationwide City Beautiful urban planning movement, focusing instead on maintaining the “city historic”; the Poetry Society of South Carolina launched in 1920; and the highly exclusive—and peculiarly white only—Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals emerged in 1922 to preserve the Gullah folk music of the Lowcountry plantations.19 These organizations—and their limited memberships which to an extent embraced women—established the portfolio of Charleston’s cultural goods and demonstrated the powerful legacy of Progressive Era ideals surrounding order, race, beauty, and sanitation.20

The conservative economic and cultural attitude of Charleston’s white elite shaped the social and physical geography of the city, and vice versa. After the Civil War, old families refused to leave their decaying mansions, a prideful act that produced a “museumlike quality” to the historic environs and gave credence to the local saying “too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.” As historian Don Doyle has argued, the signs of genteel poverty became “proud badges of a déclassé aristocracy who refused to answer the siren call of the New South.” Unlike in some Southern cities, such as Atlanta and Mobile, where wealthy families left their urban mansions for the nascent suburbs, Charlestonians held on to their historic homes as the last vestiges and symbols of their former power.21 They lamented the destruction of the beautiful, historic architecture of their city, while at the same time selling old furniture, silver, fireplaces, ironwork, and other family heirlooms to antique dealers from the North. The desire to protect Charleston’s architectural heritage from the greedy hands of outsiders—especially Northerners—catalyzed some prominent residents to form the city’s first formal preservation organization, the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings (SPOD) in 1920.

Spearheaded by the SPOD, preservation activity in Charleston during the interwar period prioritized colonial and antebellum structures of white residents that carried a history of prestige and power. Because of its location on a busy intersection in the much-visited historic area, the run-down Planters’ Hotel attracted the attention of these early preservationists. Under the leadership of Susan Pringle Frost, the SPOD attempted to save the Planters’ Hotel when the city scheduled its demolition in 1918. Frost successfully persuaded Mayor Thomas P. Stoney and the city council to seal the four conjoined buildings that comprised the corner hotel until a time when they could be restored to their former antebellum splendor. The “sealing” of the attached buildings protected the exterior walls, maintained the condition of the interior, and prevented their demolition. Additionally, it barred wealthy Northerners from acquiring the Planters’ Hotel’s valuable ironwork, woodwork, and plaster.22 Rather than committing time and money to a preservation campaign to restore the property—essentially a commercial space turned residence for mostly poor Blacks—the SPOD chose to focus its efforts on rescuing the homes of some of South Carolina’s leading families: the threatened Joseph Manigault House and the Heyward-Washington House.23 The SPOD’s choice illustrated two important trends of early twentieth-century preservation efforts: attention to elite structures over vernacular ones—in this case, upper-status domestic dwellings over former commercial sites—and the valuing of buildings firmly associated with and used by white rather than African American communities. City council codified this limited outlook of the city’s preservation movement, prescribed by prevalent gendered and racial codes, when Chaleston created a planning and zoning commission. The newly minted commission enacted the country’s first historic zoning ordinance in 1931, which designated a twenty-three-block area in the tip of the Charleston peninsula as the “Old and Historic District,” sending a clear message that within its perimeter racial hierachies and conservative values would be preserved intentionally in the built environment. While protecting domestic architecture, the zoning ordinance allowed for the commercialization of Church Street as attractions such as Cabbage Row, the Heyward-Washington House, Porgy Book Shop, and antique stores and coffeehouses drew growing numbers of tourists to admire Charleston’s historic charm.24

Historical tourism was not the only factor drawing attention to the city’s built environment. Various New Deal programs also effected radical change in the racial dynamics of the city’s urban landscape. In the fall of 1935, Charleston received a $1.1 million federal grant for the clearance of African American neighboorhoods. Throughout the late 1930s, Black residents living near the historic district and denied political voice through Jim Crow were displaced and relocated to public housing projects up the Charleston Neck, farther from the downtown area.25 In addition, Blacks disproportionally suffered dislocation from the Santee-Cooper hydroelectric project that won Mayor Maybank considerable political admiration.26 The forced movement away from the city’s historic core helped escalate a significant population shift initiated by the introduction of the US Navy to the Charleston peninsula at the turn of the twentieth century: what was once a Black-majority region became 55 percent white by 1930, and the balance remained that way for the next two decades.27 In addition to demographic changes, these discrimatory housing measures effectively minimized the “casual mixing” of white and Black residents that was both a legacy of urban slavery—whereby African Americans occupied the former slave or servants’ quarters at the back of white-owned townhouses—and a result of a population almost equally divided between the two races.28 The strengthening local preservation impulse to protect historic structures thus combined with new discriminatory legislation to engender a lasting shift in longstanding living arrangements.

Some preservationists of the period did condemn various New Deal efforts that threatened the historic built environment, such as the construction of low-cost housing and slum clearance, but their opposition was born out of reverence for historic architecture rather than respect for the lived experiences of marginalized Charlestonians. As historian Jack Irby Hayes Jr. has best concluded, with New Deal funding dramatically changing the peninsula’s physical landscape, “Charleston preservationists were ambivalent.”29 According to the 1941 WPA state guide to South Carolina, white residents “with a love of the unusual” paternalistically reclaimed city spaces historically occupied by African Americans with the goal to renovate, thereby reconfiguring the urban geography with little concern for the consequences for the former inhabitants.30 Upon witnessing the restoration work occurring on popular streets in the Old and Historic District, including Tradd, lower East Bay, Church, and Stolls Alley, local artist Elizabeth O’Neill Verner praised “what can be done if cleaning up infested neighborhoods and turning our liabilities into assets.”31 The language evident here highlighted the purposeful elimination of unwanted residents occupying desirable, if run-down, historic spaces. This early gentrification made downtown a white-dominated space which it had never been historically. The process only intensified in the coming decades as tourism increasingly centered around Charleston’s image as a living historic white city.32

The dilapidated and abandoned Planters’ Hotel, then, in its prime location in downtown Charleston, presented both a problem and an opportunity as former African American tenement housing in a historically significant area. A proposal from the political elite and New Deal money provided the solution. It is possible that Elizabeth Maybank, a prominent member of the Junior League married to the mayor, first proposed the idea to restore the Dock Street Theatre as a city project in early 1934.33 Mayor Maybank most likely then suggested the transformation of the old hotel back to the Dock Street Theatre that once occupied the corner as a potential federal project to the Charleston Art Commission that spring or summer. Afterwards, he called a special meeting of key local figures to discuss the proposal in mid-October of that year. In addition to regular members of the CAC, attendees at the meeting included New Deal officials Edmund P. Grice, the Charleston County administrator of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA, the precursor to the WPA), and Douglas D. Ellington, FERA’s architectural consultant. The committee agreed that the area surrounding the famed St. Philip’s Church on Church Street near its intersection with Queen Street—exactly where the Planters’ Hotel stood—was the most suitable for architectural restoration because it included many historic landmarks that had fallen into disrepair, including the Powder Magazine along with the once-famed hostelry.34

After the committee selected to transform the Planters’ Hotel into the Dock Street Theatre, Mayor Maybank corresponded with Harry Hopkins, a close personal friend and, at the time, the federal director of the FERA.35 According to Albert Simons, the Charleston architect whose firm would lead the restoration project, Hopkins “was immediately attracted by the plan, since it eminently fulfilled the government’s desire to underwrite projects which would provide work for the unemployed as well as be in themselves constructive and worthwhile.”36 Moreover, the Roosevelt administration was eager to allocate funds to projects that would revitalize the South.37 Throughout Maybank’s tenure in office and Hopkins’s leadership first of the FERA and later its replacement agency, the WPA, the two developed a mutually beneficial partnership which strengthened Democratic politics and the reception of New Deal initiatives in Charleston. Maybank shrewdly used his close ties with influential New Dealers to secure resources for grassroots ventures. While mayor, he advantageously sat on the board of three New Deal agencies: the Public Works Administration Advisory, the State Board of Bank Control, and the South Carolina Public Service Authority, which oversaw construction of the largely popular Santee-Cooper hydroelectric dam.38 The most prevalent criticism of the Santee-Cooper project surrounded issues of environmental degradation and the loss of historic built structures representing the region’s plantation past, exhibiting in its opposition the same attachment to the privileged racial and social orders that would fuel support of the Dock Street Theatre project.39 Maybank’s friendships and his consistent vocal backing of President Roosevelt undoubtedly helped produce a favorable attitude toward the proposed preservation project at all political levels, and ensured that the two-and-a-half year endeavor secured funding to see it to completion.

View of Church Street facing north; the old Planters’ Hotel is on the left and St. Philip’s Church is in the center. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

View of Church Street facing north; the old Planters’ Hotel is on the left and St. Philip’s Church is in the center. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

In early February of 1935, Maybank announced that upon city council’s recent agreement to purchase the property, the Dock Street Theatre officially became a FERA project.40 “Two birds are being killed with one stone,” the Charleston News & Courier jubilantly declared. First, after years of talk about its restoration, the Planters’ Hotel would be “transformed from an eyesore to a place of beauty.” Secondly, the city had found a site for a new theater, which it had been hoping to construct for some time.41 Once on the FERA docket, the Ways and Means Committee, headed by Charleston County FERA administrator Edward P. Grice, appropriated $10,000 for a sixty-day period of initial survey work. Under the supervision of FERA architect Douglas Ellington, initial excavations began on February 12. After praising Mayor Maybank’s efforts to get the work underway, Hopkins remarked that “[FERA] will pay any reasonable amount for labor and materials” when asked about the expected cost of the restoration.42 By early May, Washington officials had approved Ellington’s plans, and the architect then met with relief administrator Grice and Mayor Maybank several times to discuss moving forward. By June, ten workmen and six carpenters were engaged on the worksite and FERA already had expended $159,000.43 Early work during the summer included clearing away rubbish—mostly rotted wood and plaster—from the project location. While excavating, workers discovered marks in the roof of the Planters’ Hotel from a cannon shell, perhaps fired during the bombardment of Charleston in 1863, as well as old coins and fragments of broken china. They also unearthed the location of two cisterns, one in the central portion of the old hotel and another behind the building, which proved the existence of a residence at some point in time at the back of the hotel.44

While Douglas Ellington devised the provisional plan for the theater, which he reportedly described as the largest restoration undertaken as an emergency measure by the federal government, Charleston-based architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham marshalled the project locally.45 Working in consultation with Ellington, they drew detailed architectural plans and oversaw the day-to-day work, playing a much larger role in articulating the theater’s design than the federal architect.46 As native sons, Simons and Lapham dedicated their careers to safeguarding Charleston’s architectural heritage. Simons served as a member of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, president of the Carolina Art Association, and instructor of architecture at the College of Charleston, where Lapham also taught. Both architects became involved in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) when it was established in 1933 by the Civil Works Administration, another New Deal program. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed Lapham district administrator of HABS for South Carolina, and Simons sat on the National Advisory Board overseeing the federal program.47 The two men were uniquely qualified to direct the theater preservation project both as professionals and as bona fide Charlestonians. Once on board, Simons and Lapham immediately embraced the plan to re-create the appearance and feel of Old Charleston through manipulating the historic built environment. In a letter to Emmett Robinson, director of the local Footlight Players theater group who would first perform on the new stage, Simons expressed the opinion that it was imperative the Dock Street Theatre become “a living part of the community” and not “a museum piece, exquisite, but useless.”48

As keen architectural historians and practicing architects, Simons and Lapham did their due diligence and sought original plans before designing the new theater, but their research proved fairly fruitless.49 Despite Harry Hopkins’s public assurance that Ellington had “succeeded in obtaining a very good idea as to what the original theater looked like,” all three architects were unable to find plans or detailed accounts of the 1736 venue. A 1739 map of Charleston indicated the location and size of the first Dock Street Theatre, but early newspapers revealed only short descriptions or brief mentions of the space.50 Without the constraints supplied by abundant historical evidence and the fact that they were not even building on the original site, the architects could embellish the smaller, simpler eighteenth-century structure in a fashion that suited their contemporary vision.51 Sans building plans or even a sufficient description of its interior, the architects decided to base their design on the style of contemporary English playhouses, particularly in London. With help from Library of Congress staff, the architects found a reproduction of Christopher Wren’s design for London’s Drury Lane Theatre, an English Restoration-style structure built in 1674.52 The London theater was much larger and grander than Charleston’s colonial playhouse, but it matched the image of the thriving, culturally rich port city the project endorsed.

Simons and Lapham had their work as restoration architects cut out for them in order to invent historic Charleston. While the restored theater needed to establish a visual and experiential connection to the past, the new space also needed to be functional and not merely an architectural showpiece for Charlestonians to exhibit to tourists. The task to build a new theater behind the exterior walls of the Planters’ Hotel presented both creative and technical challenges. As discussed, what was called a “restoration” was really a rehabilitation of the extant Planters’ Hotel and new construction of the long-vanished theater. The 1930s project area included the four conjoined brick buildings that had comprised the Planters’ Hotel, extending 155 feet south from Queen Street and 120 feet west of Church Street. Three of the four buildings faced Church Street and had three stories: the first sat on the corner of the intersection; the middle brownstone structure with more elaborate decoration had served as the hotel entrance; and the third occupied the space just south of the main hotel building. The fourth building—taller at four stories—faced Queen Street. According to Simons, by 1935 the four buildings “were all but shelled. As though gutted by fire, virtually all the interiors were completely gone or rotted beyond repair.”53 Effectively, and as much admitted to by the architects, any interior “restoration” work would in truth be highly educated and thoughtful guesswork.

Diving into the task at hand, the architects creatively reconfigured the existing buildings to produce a theatrical space inspired by elegant colonial theaters, but one that would also account for modern convenience and entertainment needs. They designed a two-story theater for the area formed by the “L” of the four attached buildings, making it invisible from the street. The audience would sit facing Queen Street with the stage built to abut the four-story building to the north. The total project area, thus, created a rectangular space, with the theater occupying a much larger footprint than its colonial predecessor. The theater and secondary rooms dominated most of the main floor, but plans for the building in the southeast corner of the project included a restaurant and dining room. The architects intended to transform the southwest portion of the rectangle into an outdoor courtyard with a fountain and space for dining. Offices, a balcony, and foyer would occupy the second floor of the rehabilitated buildings, while the third floor was to be divided into eight apartments for white occupants.54

Interior view of the Dock Street Theatre’s auditorium. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Interior view of the Dock Street Theatre’s auditorium. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

Unsurprisingly, the architects paid particular attention to plans for the main attraction: the theater itself. Simons and Lapham believed the project’s credibility rested largely on their adherence to principles of colonial theater architecture, even if the construction and style did not mimic Charleston’s 1736 playhouse. As English Restoration theaters of the seventeenth century typically featured a proscenium arch that framed the stage and bench seating, Simons incorporated five hundred tilted seats attached to a bench-style back in the Dock Street Theatre’s design. The architects also built thirteen viewing boxes seating eight persons each to flank three sides of the theater and a gallery at the back of the main space.55

Overall, the new theater could accommodate almost six hundred people, which was probably at least three times the capacity of the original structure. Besides drawing on London playhouses for inspiration, Simons honored Charleston’s own built heritage in the interior décor. He mimicked nearby St. Michael’s Church in the coved ceiling of the theater and copied the British coat-of-arms above the stage from St. James Church in Goose Creek, an area north of Charleston.56 Additional details and decorative elements fashioned an environment in which the audience would “have the illusion of sitting in an 18th century playhouse,” since the genuine experience was denied them.57 Georgian-inspired woodwork of black cypress gleamed from an applied mixture of vinegar and iron filings; drapery decorated the viewing boxes and served in place of doors over the entryways leading from the lobby to the theater; chandeliers hung from the ceiling; brackets along the paneled walls encased electric candles; and a black metal ring suspended by chains held candle lights that hung in front of the stage.58

While the new theater represented the eighteenth century only symbolically, the extant buildings utilized for the project remained physical, aging legacies of the nineteenth century. The architects aimed to protect the patina of the Planters’ Hotel’s façade on Church Street, the image most associated with the project and visible to passersby. Simons and Lapham made sure to preserve the most distinguishing features of the old structure: the original cast iron balcony in a morning-glory pattern and sandstone entrance columns with rare carved mahogany cornices from Barbados. Without compromising the integrity of the historic material, the architects repaired the brickwork and the balcony, installed new window sashes and frames, and applied a thin color wash to the repaired walls to duplicate “the soft rose of the old stucco.” In addition, they reinforced the exterior walls and foundations, and rebuilt the roof, floors, and partitions with mostly steel and concrete, modern materials which they hid from sight. Ellington, Simons, and Lapham later explicitly described the preservation philosophy that guided their creative approach to the surviving historic structures in the January 1938 issue of Architectural Record: “The technique of restoration in Charleston differs substantially from that in vogue elsewhere in that it is ‘freer’ and tends to preserve, externally at least, the cumulative effects of age and use.”59 Their explanation illustrates that the architects did not feel bound by the many limitations of their site; they embraced the unconventional nature of the project to merge an imagined theater with an extant structure, and while they felt “freer” to reinvent the space tucked behind its walls, they intentionally chose to carefully preserve the hotel’s exterior. The façade, after all, irrefutably offered tangible history and lent credibility to the idea of a genuine historic space being restored rather than merely a new construction project.

To further enhance the ambience of Old Charleston in a space with mostly new material, Simons and Lapham employed architectural elements salvaged from a nearby nineteenth-century mansion, the Radcliffe-King House, in the theater’s interior. The relocated ornamentation played a crucial role in creating the illusion that the new Dock Street Theatre maintained an unbroken connection with the Charleston of yesteryear despite the damaging fire that ravaged the colonial playhouse, the rise and fall of the antebellum Planters’ Hotel, and the affronting deterioration that was a consequence of tenement housing. The Radcliffe-King pieces reminded visitors of Charleston’s former glory and boosted the potential prosperity of the theater by embellishing it with artifacts from a notable and period-appropriate historic home. The Federal-Style mansion, built in the first decade of the 1800s by the wealthy merchant George Radcliffe, sat on the corner of Meeting and George streets nearby the homes of prominent Charlestonians Gabriel Manigault and Thomas Pinckney. In 1824, leading South Carolina jurist Mitchell King bought the estate from the Radcliffe family and turned his home into a center of literary and artistic life. He entertained prestigious guests, including the famous English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and American novelist and historian William Gilmore Simms.60 When King died in 1862, his son assumed ownership of the home and sold the property to the City of Charleston in 1880. City council then rehabilitated the building for use as the new boys’ public high school. When enrollment increased to over five hundred pupils, the city decided that the building no longer met the school’s needs and abandoned the property in 1922, leaving it to physically decline much like the Planters’ Hotel at the time. The disregard for these once notable properties is indicative of the poor economic circumstances of the 1920s, but also of the preservation community’s deprioritizing of commercial, vernacular, and other non-domestic structures.

Simons and Lapham took notice of the unoccupied and threatened mansion-turned-school: here was an authentic relic of Old Charleston devalued by the city and unworthy of a preservation campaign, but with original architecture perfect for the city’s new theater. The two architects already had earned themselves the reputation of a preservation-minded firm by recycling materials from buildings endangered by demolition to use in their projects. Simons especially viewed the salvaging of Charleston’s architecture as a way to combat the loss of civic and cultural identity.61 When he learned the City Board of Public School Commissioners planned to destroy the former Radcliffe-King mansion, he urged his partner Lapham to ask his father, a city councilman with connections to the school board, to allow their firm to conscript architectural elements from the house’s interior. The school board granted Simons’ salvage request, and when it listed the building for sale for $25,000 in 1935, it did so with the condition that the interior woodwork be retained for use in the Dock Street Theatre. The Charleston Museum became the pieces’ repository until Simons and Lapham were ready to install them in the theater.62

The material culture rescued from the antebellum home fabricated a visual and physical continuity with the past for theatergoers in the late 1930s. The Radcliffe-King elements were Adam style, a European neoclassical decorative style popularized in post-revolutionary America under the name “Federal Style.” They included elaborate mantelpieces, Palladian windows, scrolled plasterwork, wainscot, cornices, and mahogany doors. The mantelpieces, relocated to the theater’s green room, were some of the most decorative and impressive salvaged items, featuring Ionic and Corinthian columns, biblical scenes, angelic figures, and draped floral embellishments.63 Simons described the installation of this repurposed décor as difficult and necessitating exceptional consideration. The pieces’ removal, transportation, and placement in the spaces of the new theater “represented a special problem calling for the utmost care and skill.”64 In order to sympathetically integrate the salvaged architecture into the theater, the “usual construction procedure had to be reversed.” Rather than the interior woodwork being designed to fit the space, the openings had to be fitted for the Radcliffe-King pieces “in order that the symmetry, proportion and design of these valuable features of the building might not be marred.”65 The architects’ delicate work gained the attention of one local newspaper editor who reverentially termed the installed pieces “Relics Preserved” in the Charleston Evening Post. Safeguarding the real historic artifacts of a previous era in an otherwise imagined historical space became an especially important method of upholding the theater’s mirage of authenticity. Moreover, the integration of high-style architectural elements from a leading family’s former home captured the very essence of Old Charleston, as the city’s domestic historic architecture—the most commanding symbol of the conservative and powerful planter class—dominated historical tourism imagery.

The success of the theatre’s architectural revival rested on theatergoers’ experiential relationship to the past, effected through the material culture of the spatial environment itself. Therefore, while the colonial theatre was, in truth, a reconstruction of the imagination, and the modern equipment was hidden from sight as much as possible, the antebellum structure carried the load of performing authenticity. As historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage has argued, historic architecture “made tangible the mythic colonial and antebellum South, allowing visitors to experience firsthand remnants of what was purportedly one of the nation’s most elegant and refined societies.”66 In the 1930s, romanticizing the historic South, especially through architecture, emerged as a common trend of popular culture as it reinforced traditional values and offered a creative escape from modern troubles.67 Charleston’s literary celebrity DuBose Heyward expressed this quality of architecture to preserve and perpetuate cultural values and previous manners and modes of living in his appraisal of the project. He fittingly described the Adam style woodwork as bringing to the new theater “not only its beauty of plaster and woodwork but its wealth of tradition extending far back into Charleston’s past.” He continued with an account of the complementary architectural styles combined in the one preservation project:

[H]ere was no slavish reproduction of a single period, but a bringing together under a single roof of an early eighteenth-century theatre, a group of simple early Charleston dwelling houses, an unmistakable example of the Classic Revival, and the harmonious incorporation therein of interior decoration removed bodily from a Georgian mansion. The harmonizing of these various factors, the ingenuity and taste with which they were merged one into another, and the delightful element of the unexpected which one now encounters in passing from room to room, give this building a character unique in American restorations.68

Salvaged mantelpiece from the Radcliffe-King House. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Salvaged mantelpiece from the Radcliffe-King House. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

If the rebuilt theater was meant to capture the spirit of a 1736 playhouse, the architectural pieces moved from the Radcliffe-King House into the rooms of the rehabilitated Planters’ Hotel “uniquely,” if not faithfully, put Charleston’s prosperous antebellum history on display. As material culture scholar Leora Auslander has argued, three-dimensional objects can serve as “memory cues, as souvenirs in a quite literal sense.”69 While attendees in the 1930s could not walk away after an evening of entertainment with a piece of architecture, the theater itself became a spatial memory cue recalling the cherished imagery of a flourishing and white-dominated Charleston. The Radcliffe-King pieces were integral props in painting this immersive scene.

Finally, the architects introduced the twentieth century—contemporary Charleston—in the modern lighting, sound, and stage equipment brought into the new performance space. The Carolina Art Association boasted that the fifty-six feet by thirty-six feet stage with a three-story fly loft and projectors for motion pictures was of “the most modern design and far more complete than in any other theatre in the south.”70 The theater also featured a revolving stage to enable quick scene changes. A WPA relief worker on the job similarly described the switchboard as “of the most modern kind” with trap doors in the stage floor. Moreover, the fireproof stage had an asbestos curtain with fusable lengths, which, like solder, melted and released the curtain at a certain temperature.71 According to DuBose Heyward, the effect of the architects’ sensible and inspired design combined “to an extraordinary degree the atmosphere of the past with the elaborate equipment of the modern theatre.” Wrapped in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative garb, the twentieth-century theater of reinforced concrete was built to “withstand the assaults of centuries.”72

Two months before the theater was set to open its curtains, Douglas D. Ellington told the city’s Exchange Club that “Charleston probably is creating the germ which will serve as the nucleus for the national theater movement in America.”74 His words conveyed a tall order, and the project, accordingly, had turned out to be more extensive and expensive than predicted. Initially, plans called for the Dock Street Theatre to open on February 12, 1936, to mark the institution’s two-hundredth anniversary. The timeframe was soon extended, however, most likely as a result of construction challenges posed by the meticulous and careful adaptive use of the Planters’ Hotel, as well as the labor turnover common to New Deal relief projects. Changes in work relief administration as the FERA was phased out and the WPA initiated also accounted for delays in the theater’s progress. While waiting for more funds to be released in October of 1936, the work force of forty men was reduced to a “skeleton crew” of a carpenter and a few laborers who boarded up the property to protect it. By the end of the month, President Roosevelt had signed an order renewing the theater as a WPA project and allotting more funds so that work could restart.75 At the project’s end a year later, the federal government had allocated an astounding $350,000 to restore the Dock Street Theatre.76 In summary, Simons reported that engineering preparations necessitated over twenty-five sheets of architectural drawings, more than one hundred sheets of architectural detail, and around twenty-five sheets of structural, electrical, mechanical, and heating plans. The building also required sixty-four tons of structural steel, an acre of flooring, eight miles of wood strips for plaster, 530 tons of concrete, and “uncounted bricks, kegs of nails and gallons of paint.” Over the course of the project, workers removed over 1,500 truckloads of rubbish from the site and donated one hundred truckloads of flooring and framing to the poor to use as firewood.77

While some Charlestonians may have been impressed with the demanding work as well as the finished product, the WPA undoubtedly capitalized on the technical feats faced and overcome by the architects so that it could propagandize the project to which it contributed an extraordinary amount of federal funds. A WPA publicity release sent to hundreds of daily newspapers in November of 1937 announced the project’s completion and highlighted the engineering problems that arose during the construction phase. For example, to reinforce the building without removing the existing walls, workers developed a “special technique” that required digging six-to-eight-feet-deep pockets beside the solid standing walls which allowed them to remain intact.78 In emphasizing the construction challenges, the architects and the WPA officials positioned the theater as a national example of masterfully executed architectural restoration.

Not everyone, however, was enamored with the theater’s reappearance. Criticism of the project reveals that contemporaries understood the creative liberties taken by the architects in their design of the theater, and questioned the value of investing enormous funds into inventing historic spaces. One such critic was journalist R. P. Harris, a preeminent editorial writer based in Baltimore. In an article for the Baltimore Evening Sun, Harris wrote, “Surely, the architects had a delightful time with this project. They ransacked decayed mansions for lovely doors and panels, they experimented with plaster and paint and ornamentation, to achieve what seems beyond question the right effect.” Harris’s language makes the salvage effort praised by Charlestonians sound like a plundering of the city’s treasures. He also predicted that in a city of less than 65,000 people and with most out-of-towners preferring to visit plantations and beaches, there would not be enough interest in theatergoing to justify the cost of construction or sustain an audience once open.79

In the midst of the Depression, Harris’s concerns about the extravagance of entertainment endeavors were understandable and shared by some locals. The Charleston News & Courier, the city’s leading conservative newspaper, published a few critical views of the preservation project. In the mid-1930s, the paper was under the editorship of William W. Ball, a politically conservative Democrat notorious for his vocal and ardent opposition to the New Deal.80 Ball’s paper printed the opinion of one resident, who after an inspection of the Charleston County jail criticized money being spent on an “unnecessary project” like the Dock Street Theatre when funds could be used to improve prison conditions.81 Moreover, support for federal funding of the arts was not universal. A Charleston resident writing to the News & Courier called it “no business of government in any circumstance to hire unemployed musicians, artists, actors, writers.”82 This comment speaks to the larger wave of criticism leveled in the mid-to-late 1930s against the WPA’s Federal One programs, particularly the politically controversial Federal Theatre Project which led to congressional scrutiny and the program’s early end in 1939.83 Despite these voices of discontent, and probably aided by its designation as a WPA construction project rather than an arts project, the Dock Street Theatre generally received remarkable admiration and praise from Charlestonians, government officials, and the press alike. Holger Cahill, national director of the WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP), even named the theater one of the most important federal projects in the state.84

As the theater neared completion, the City of Charleston considered the options for its permanent management. The preservation project was not simply a nostalgic experiment of Charleston’s elite to maintain power, but was also intended to serve as a vehicle for cultural revival, complementing the work of Charleston Renaissance artists and writers. The Ways and Means Committee of the city council recommended that the Carolina Art Association (CAA), which had managed the popular Gibbes Art Gallery since 1905 and whose members boasted deep roots in the city, take over management of the theater following its opening on the condition that it raise $12,000 from private individuals for operation and maintenance costs.85 Just over two weeks before opening night, the CAA entered a two-year contract with the City of Charleston to manage the Dock Street Theatre for one dollar a year.86 Upon assuming control, CAA president Robert N. S. Whitelaw said it was his desire to make it “a vital part of the life of the community and in no sense a stagnant ‘museum piece,’” echoing architect Simons’s earlier statement.87 The CAA imagined that local art organizations such as the Footlight Players, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Musical Art Club, and the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals would be eager to use the theater in the years to come. The hope was for the expensive preservation project to spark interest in and then help sustain Charleston’s abundant cultural offerings, whose appeal would be shared locally and beyond the city’s borders.

While the question of future management was under deliberation, the Footlight Players acting troupe began readying the theater for the first performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. The South Carolina FAP, under the direction of state director Robert Armstrong Andrews, oversaw set production. Although many FAP workers helped create the sets, local artist and actress Alicia Rhett directed the painting of scenery. The stage’s main backdrop was based on prominent nineteenth-century artist and playwright John Blake White’s 1838 painting of Charleston, which depicted Broad Street’s St. Michael’s Church, the old custom house, and other notable landmarks.88 Rhett also painted the English coat of arms over the proscenium arch surrounding the stage. While working on the Dock Street Theatre’s props, Rhett successfully auditioned for a role as heroine Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in the film adaption of Gone with the Wind, the famously romantized acount of the Civil War South, drawing further attention to the theater’s restoration.89 Meanwhile, women in the nearby WPA sewing room on Queen Street spent many weeks making the stage and balcony curtains, whose rust-colored velour with dull gold edging “blend[ed] beautifully with the Cypress paneling” of the balcony boxes and “add[ed] greatly to the old fashioned appearance.”90 These props were part and parcel of the larger fabrication; they adorned the interior—so meticulously and creatively constructed—with the appropriate décor to complete the proper picture.

The dedication to perfecting the illusion of Old Charleston, however, required specialized labor beyond the abilities of WPA relief workers. The architects turned to local talent to complete the design plans, hiring two skilled artisans to lend their expertise. The first was seventy-two-year-old John Smith, “a negro artisan not on relief rolls.” Smith had previously restored the plasterwork on St. Philip’s Church in 1920, and was hired to decorate the elaborate plaster cornices and ceiling of the theater.91 According to the superintendent of construction, Smith was “the only man in Charleston who knows how to do such work.”92 The second skilled artisan employed was William Melton Halsey, a young native Charlestonian who had studied fresco painting under renowned artist Lewis Rubenstein while attending the prestigious School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Albert Simons gave Halsey his first commission as a professional artist when he hired him to work on the Dock Street Theatre. According to Halsey, Simons “was very concerned that everything should be in period so that none of what I did was original.”93 Consequently, Halsey decorated the courtyard fresco with the traditional theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy copied from the old Academy of Music in Charleston, and adapted paintings by eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth to complete the four oil murals in the barroom.94

View of Charleston artist William Melton Halsey’s fresco in the courtyard. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

View of Charleston artist William Melton Halsey’s fresco in the courtyard. Photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1936 or 1937. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Close modal

The exterior preserved, the interior gutted and rebuilt, the construction challenges overcome, and the decorations set, all was prepared for opening week. After thirty months of construction, from May of 1935 to November of 1937, the Dock Street Theatre restoration finally had come to an end. The CAA issued one thousand invitations to the city’s and state’s leading figures for the first two invitation-only performances of The Recruiting Officer, scheduled for Friday, November 26, and Saturday, November 27.95 Taking their esteemed places amongst South Carolina’s elite on Friday evening were federal representatives Harry Hopkins, WPA director; Ellen S. Woodward, assistant director in charge of women’s and professional projects; and Nikolai Sokoloff, director of the Federal Music Project. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt received an invitation, but was unable to attend because of prearranged Thanksgiving plans.96 No invitations were sent to any of Charleston’s African American residents. Leading up to the theater’s unveiling, the WPA’s central office drafted an announcement to be released to newspapers nationwide: “Hopkins to Dedicate Historic Theater Restored by WPA Workers.”97 Excitement brewed in major cities across the country as Charleston prepared to reveal its reconstructed colonial gem. Newspaper editors from the Associated Press, Washington Post, and New York Times sent letters to Albert Simons and the CAA requesting information and photographs of the theater. Closer to home, the State newspaper in Columbia congratulated Charleston on its success, which represented “the springing of a memorable past into this present New Deal modernity.”98 The efforts to make a statement about contemporary Charleston and its future through preservation activity had not been lost on the press, either local or national.

Opening evening’s scheduled pomp and circumstance dazzled the special invitees; organizers created an ambience as grand and sparkling as the new theater in which they were to be entertained. Dressed in period garb, Citadel cadets and College of Charleston students served as ushers and escorted guests to their seats. They presented attendees with three souvenirs celebrating the theater’s completion after two-and-a-half years of painstaking research and construction: a commemorative booklet prepared by Douglas Ellington, the program to The Recruiting Officer, and handheld fans for the women. Roberta Maybank, the mayor’s daughter, distributed fans similar to ones ladies would have used in 1736 to conceal their blushes during the risqué performance.99 These period-appropriate effects turned audience members into performers themselves as they adopted the behavior of colonial gentility. Once guests found their seats, the evening formally began with a Charleston String Symphony concert illuminated by candlelight.

Following the musical performance, WPA director Harry Hopkins presented the key to the theater to Mayor Maybank, enacting the giving and receiving of the “gift” of the Dock Street Theatre from the federal government to the City of Charleston. In his speech, Hopkins related to the audience his affection for the southern city and acknowledged its distinct heritage:

There is no city in America where this could have been done other than Charleston. This city has escaped the ruthless march of the industrial system. Here a heritage of culture and arts is honored and respected. In dedicating this theater I would dedicate it to the people of Charleston—proud, fearless, courageous, intelligent. You have accepted faithfully a proud heritage and I believe your children and your children’s children will accept the same heritage from you untarnished. Two hundred years from now our descendants may sit in this very theater.…It gives me great pleasure to present to the mayor of this city the key to this theater on behalf of the United States government.100

Hopkins certainly romanticized the city’s illustrious past and unique claim to resisting modernity; Charleston had not escaped the march of industrialization. Nevertheless, he accurately voiced the city’s deep commitment to wielding its built heritage as a tool to educate and entertain future generations. Hopkins further affirmed the WPA’s substantial investment—both financially and ideologically—in the preservation of the local landmark. The Dock Street Theatre was significant not only to Charleston’s history, but to that of the US as signified by his use of “our descendants” and the suggestion that Americans from across the nation would find value in the historical space.

After Hopkins’s speech, the play’s lead actor recited a prologue written by DuBose Heyward specifically for the evening before the Footlight Players launched into their performance of The Recruiting Officer. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, which had gained national attention through tours and radio programs, closed the evening’s program with ten of its most famous songs. In the words of one audience member, “the concert provided an appropriate climax to a night filled with exact reproduction of life in Charleston two hundred years ago.”101 Following the spirituals, Mayor Maybank invited the audience to inspect the theater, which led to “marveling at the remarkable craftsmanship shown in the restoration of the old building, its beautiful mantels, paneling, woodwork and architectural strength and beauty.”102 This tour of appreciation highlighted the role of the relocated Radcliffe-King House pieces in maintaining the illusion, and marked a fitting end to the evening that reestablished Charleston’s significant theatrical tradition. Before leaving the city, Hopkins told a reporter that the Dock Street Theatre was “one of the great institutions of America.”103

The press coverage of opening night was overwhelmingly favorable, and news of the restoration spread far beyond the South. On Sunday following the first performance, the New York Times published a column and two pictures of the theater. The following month, Life included seven pictures from the premiere, captioning them “First U.S. Theatre is Restored—Charleston blue bloods give it gala opening.” The first Architectural Record issue of the next year contained twenty-two illustrations of the restored theater, and that same month Charleston schoolteacher Daisy Mae Roberts’s article lauding the project for representing “a perfect blending of the atmosphere of the past with the ingenuity of the present” appeared in Scholastic.104 Hopkins, Maybank, Ellington, Simons, and Lapham could find proof in these editorials that they had achieved their goal of recreating a powerful visual of Old Charleston. At the same time, their work addressed a contemporary audience and sowed seeds of anticipation that Charleston would emerge from the Depression—with help from the federal government—as a cultural capital of the South.

As hoped for when plans for the restoration first materialized, various art and cultural organizations made use of the performing arts space, including the Charleston String Symphony, the Charleston Philharmonic, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Dramatic Society of the College of Charleston, the Junior League of Charleston, and the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings.105 Despite the recommendations of theater experts to employ professional actors and staff, as well as the flattering interest of the Federal Theatre Project’s national director Hallie Flanagan, theater operations remained community-based with the local Footlight Players retaining its position as resident troupe.106 Moreover, Charleston’s favorite literary figure, DuBose Heyward, continued to lend his fame to the Dock Street Theatre by assuming the position of writer-in-residence from 1937 until his death in 1940.107 The Dock Street Theatre became “a marvelous chance to attract people,” but was a treasure first and foremost for the employment and enjoyment of Charlestonians.108

The city’s cultural elite evidently had succeeded in instilling a reverence for the past in visitors by attending to the preservation of historic structures. When renowned writer of horror fiction H. P. Lovecraft visited Charleston in January of 1936, in the midst of the Dock Street Theatre project, he penned a letter to a friend in which expressed his appreciation for the city’s architecture. In his “systematic itinerary” of a walking tour of the downtown area, he ignored the dire economic troubles the city faced and instead admired the “unique colonial features” of the grand homes and buildings actively maintained. Lovecraft venerated famous local sites, marveling at the ongoing restoration of the old Planters’ Hotel and the Georgian buildings of Vanderhorst Row on East Bay Street, home to some of the city’s wealthiest and oldest families. Because of this “encouraging reclamation” of historic landmarks funded by New Deal programs—which Lovecraft hoped “may not be interrupted by any reactionary political move”—Charleston remained “refreshingly free from ‘modernistic’ architecture.” After taking in its charm and history, the writer remarked that the city “is alive in every sense despite the omnipresent aura of the past.”109

In the souvenir booklet published to commemorate the Dock Street Theatre’s grand opening, the director of the South Carolina Federal Arts Project reminded contemporary audiences of the WPA project’s pragmatic appeal and idealized charm: “The story of this reconstruction is a chapter in the greater story of the government’s program of work relief. But it is also a chapter of compelling romance.”110 The preservation project was both practical and ideological, and exemplified the process of cultural production operating at the federal and local levels during the Depression. The project dually served Burnet Maybank’s liberal plan to modernize his city and build his Democratic coalition and Charleston’s political and social elite’s agenda to safeguard structures that reinforced racial and class hierarchies. In achieving both goals, the WPA-funded project allowed Charleston to make its claim as a modern regional art center and restore the cultural status it enjoyed in a more prosperous era, with historic preservation as the vehicle for realizing those ends.

All preservation is political and requires making choices to either conserve embedded power structures or change them. This case study about a preservation project in 1930s Charleston with major funding from the federal government, but no real oversight, resulted in an eccentrically “preserved” space: an authentic façade shrouding an imagined interior that fit the project leaders’ political and cultural goals. Today, the Dock Street Theatre stands at one of the busiest blocks in a major center of the tourist South. If the project were to take place now, preservation decisions would be guided by stricter regulations set by a highly professionalized field, newer and more advanced technologies, increased federal involvement and supervision, and, importantly, a more inclusive preservation agenda to capture the stories of peoples and places that tell the nation’s diverse and challenging histories. For these reasons, preservationists would offer a modified argument for why the historic structures at the intersection of Queen and Church streets should be preserved, but would also make different choices about how to go about preserving them. In fact, the project probably would not be named for the Dock Street Theatre, but rather called the Planters’ Hotel project, as practitioners tend to value extant historic structures over ones that have disappeared. Indeed, current preservation laws and ethics would mandate the prioritization of what exists rather than what once existed. Perhaps, as well, the place-associated stories of the city’s difficult decline post-Civil War and the demographic shift—exemplified by the transition of the once popular hotel into tenement housing—would outshine the myth of historic Charleston with which we have become so familiar, in part because of projects like the 1930s construction of an imagined colonial theater. The old Planters’ Hotel might be rehabilitated into fixed-income apartments or restored as a hotel, honoring the historic functions of the space and meeting the demands of the city’s bustling tourism industry. And, if the project needed federal funding in the form of tax credits, for example, detailed guidelines would inform the appropriate treatment of historic materials and introduction of modern methods and elements. This brief hypothetical sojourn shows that political climate and the contours of the field define what is and what is not possible in preservation. In the 1930s, elite Charlestonians had the political and cultural agency, freedom, and money to dictate what message one historical corner of the city would convey from the 1930s to today: a powerful and enduring portrait of an imagined and exclusionary past. Occurring at an alternative time under different political and professional circumstances, the preservation narrative would not unfold in the same way.

1.

For discussion of twentieth-century efforts to preserve cultural heritage in Charleston, see Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robert R. Weyeneth, Historic Preservation for a Living City: Historic Charleston Foundation, 1947–1997 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2000); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Exhibiting Southernness in a New Century,” in The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 183–226.

2.

Many of the leading figures of the Charleston Renaissance, such as artist Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Alfred Hutty, regarded the city’s architecture as its most distinguishing feature and made Charleston’s built environment the focus of their work. Novelist and poet Josephine Pinckney used the Dock Street Theatre restoration specifically to symbolize the New Deal era in a play written for the Carolina Art Association. The play, asserting the city’s colonial prominence, was intended to be performed at Middleton Place, an eighteenth-century rice plantation and major tourist attraction. The 1946 project was never completed. Barbara L. Bellows, A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 206. For further discussion of the Charleston Renaissance, see James M. Hutchisson and Harlan Greene, eds., Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 19001940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003).

3.

“1736–1937: In Commemoration and Rededication of the Dock Street Theatre, Charleston, S.C.,” (Charleston, SC: City of Charleston, 1937), South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina [hereafter SCL].

4.

For explanations of the four preservation techniques employed by practitioners in the field—preservation, restoration, rehabilitation/adaptive use, and reconstruction—see the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, https://www.nps.gov/tps/standards.htm. For examples of preservation projects of these techniques, see William Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America, 8th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010), and Robert Stipe, ed., A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation and the Twenty-First Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

5.

This analytical framework is inspired by cultural and architectural historians who have analyzed how buildings, landscapes, and their material components—both real and imagined—have been dynamic forces in shaping American culture and politics. They include Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Daniel Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011). Other examples in a growing literature include Gabrielle M. Esperdy, Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Joseph Heathcott, “Reading the Accidental Archive: Architecture, Ephemera, and Landscape as Evidence of an Urban Public Culture,” Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 239–68; Elizabeth C. Cromley, The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Dianne Suzette Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

6.

The lot of land on which the Dock Street Theatre was built was listed as No. 113 and registered to Nicholas Barlicorn on a 1693 map of Charleston. The theater was built on a parcel of this lot, 49 feet west of Church Street and 70 feet in front on Queen Street. Emmett Robinson, “A Guide to the Dock Street Theatre and Brief Resume of the Theatres in Charleston, S.C. from 1730” (Charleston: The Footlight Players, Inc., 1963), 4. College of Charleston Libraries accessed via Lowcountry Digital Library, http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:22092?page=lcdl:22077.

7.

Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina III (1716–1752) (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1838), 403, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433007185295; Julia Curtis, “A Note on Henry Holt,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 79, no. 1 (January 1978): 1n1, 3–4.

8.

Martha Zierden et al., “The Dock Street Theatre: Archaeological Discovery and Exploration,” Charleston Museum Archaeological Contributions 42 (Charleston: Charleston Museum, 2009): 45–49. For discussion of early theaters in Charleston, see Hugh F. Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); James H. Dormon, Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 1815–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Charles S. Watson, Antebellum Charleston Dramatists (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976); Watson, The History of Southern Drama (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

9.

When Englishman John Lambert visited Charleston in 1809, he stayed at the Calders’ first Planters’ Hotel (before its relocation to the former site of the Dock Street Theatre). Of the establishment he wrote, “there are four or five hotels and coffee-houses in Charleston; but, except the Planters’ hotel in Meeting-street, there is not one superior to an English public-house. The accommodations at the Planters’ hotel are respectable, and the price about twelve dollars a-week.” Jennie Holton Fant, ed., The Travelers’ Charleston: Accounts of Charleston and Lowcountry, South Carolina, 1666–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 103n, 104n. While the Calders were away in Europe, an innkeeper named Orran Byrd presided over the establishment. He added nine rooms and expanded the stables in 1816. “30. Dock Street Theater, 1736,” Alfred O. Halsey Map 1949, Preservation Society of Charleston, http://www.halseymap.com/flash/window.asp?HMID=14.

10.

Eola Willis, The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century: With Social Settings of the Time (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1924), 22; Sidney R. Bland, “Women and World’s Fairs: The Charleston Story,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 94, no. 3 (July 1993): 166–84.

11.

A German visitor to the city in 1839 commented on the hostelry’s popularity and success, noting that “because of many guests, we had to be satisfied with a tiny room. The [former] proprietor netted $30,000 after a mere fourteen years of hotel keeping.” Cited in Frederic Trautmann, “South Carolina through a German’s Eyes: The Travels of Clara von Gerstner, 1839,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 85, no. 3 (July 1984): 221.

12.

“30. Dock Street Theater, 1736,” Alfred O. Halsey Map 1949, Preservation Society of Charleston, http://www.halseymap.com/flash/window.asp?HMID=14.

13.

A special correspondent to the New York Times in 1861 met with volunteers and officers in the hostelry to learn of the local affairs of the war. “From Charleston: A Slight Difference of Opinion About that Firing,” New York Times, March 14, 1861; “Affairs at Fort Sumpter [sic]—Messengers Going To and Fro,” New York Times, March 26, 1861.

14.

The secretary and chief case worker for the Associated Charities Society of Charleston described an encounter in 1913 with a transient single mother driven to begging who was temporarily residing at the old Planters Hotel. Laylon Wayne Jordan, “‘The Method of Modern Charity’: The Associated Charities Society of Charleston, 1888–1920,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 88, no. 1 (January 1987): 44.

15.

In 1922, neighbors upset with the changing racial demographics of the area petitioned Charleston City Council to evict the African American tenants then occupying Cabbage Row, successfully leading to its vacancy in the 1920s. Ellen Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 56, 72, 129. Works that address the changing socio-political dynamic between white and Black residents in Charleston following the Civil War include Wilbert L. Jenkins, Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Katie Ann Stojsavljevic, “Housing and Living Patterns Among Charleston’s Free People of Color in Wraggborough, 1796–1877,” (MA thesis, Clemson University, 2007); Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973); Bernard Edward Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994); Jeffrey Strickland, “How the Germans Became White Southerners: German Immigrants and African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, 1860–1880,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 52–69.

16.

T. R. Waring, Jr., “A Cradle of America’s Theater Will Harbor the Drama Again,” New York Herald Tribune, December 12, 1937.

17.

Blaine A. Brownell and David R. Goldfield, eds., The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), 128; Don Harrison Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 55–61, 162, 232. The development of modern waterfront facilities began in 1912 farther up the Charleston Neck, thereby avoiding altering the historic built environment of the peninsula despite significant economic change.

18.

Jack Irby Hayes Jr., South Carolina and the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 3.

19.

The Charleston Art Commission was made up of the mayor and representatives of the Carolina Art Association, Charleston Library Society, Charleston Museum, South Carolina Historical Society, and three citizens, whose duty was to review “matters affecting the aesthetic and historic interests of the city” brought before the city council. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 226–28.

20.

Some works that address Progressive Era concepts of race, cleanliness, and social order include Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Daniel Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Kristen R. Egan, “Conservation and Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 77–92; Linda J. Rynbrandt, “The ‘Ladies of the Club’ and Caroline Bartlett Crane: Affiliation and Alienation in Progressive Social Reform,” Gender and Society 11, no. 2 (April 1997): 200–14.

21.

Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 228–38.

22.

Hayes, South Carolina and the New Deal, 41–3; Sidney R. Bland, Preserving Charleston’s Past, Shaping Its Future: The Life and Times of Susan Pringle Frost, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 71; Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Rich and Tender Remembering: Elite White Women and an Aesthetic Sense of Place in Charleston, 1920s and 1930s,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 227–48.

23.

While Frost and the SPOD were not actively involved in the Dock Street Theatre’s restoration in the 1930s, architect Albert Simons acknowledged that Frost and the organization deserved “much credit for safeguarding the old Planters’ Hotel buildings” when they were under threat of demolition in 1918. Albert Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937; Hayes, South Carolina and the New Deal, 42.

24.

Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory, 166–67; Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 129–30.

25.

Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory, 45, 48–49; Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 133.

26.

Kieran W. Taylor, ed., Charleston and the Great Depression: A Documentary History, 1929–1941 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), xv. For the controversy over federal housing projects, which resulted in the construction of Cooper River Court for Blacks and Meeting Street Manor for whites, see Hayes, South Carolina and the New Deal, 74. T. Robert Hart notes that of the 901 families displaced by the Santee-Cooper project, over 800 were Black. “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project,” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (January 2013): 151.

27.

Regina Bures and William Kanapaux, “Historical Regimes and Social Indicators of Resilience in an Urban System: The Case of Charleston, South Carolina,” Ecology and Society 16, no. 4 (December 2011): 16.

28.

Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 301–2.

29.

Hayes, South Carolina and the New Deal, 42.

30.

Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of South Carolina, South Carolina: A Guide to the Palmetto State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 187.

31.

Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, “Preserving Our Own,” Charleston News & Courier, January 26, 1938.

32.

For discussion of the development of gentrification especially as it intersected with historical tourism in twentieth-century Charleston, see Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory; Weyeneth, Historic Preservation for a Living City; Regina Bures, “Historic Preservation, Gentrification, and Tourism: The Transformation of Charleston, South Carolina,” in K. F. Gotham, ed., Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (New York: Elsevier Press, 2001), 195–210.

33.

Brittany V. Lavelle Tulla, “Huger, Cleland Kinlock and Burnet R. Maybank House,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, BVL Historic Preservation Research, October 5, 2015.

34.

Collison, “Project Reaches Fruition 3 Years After Inception,” Charleston Evening Post, November 26, 1937; Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

35.

As evidence of their close relationship, Hopkins and his wife spent Thanksgiving with the Maybanks in 1936, and the mayor was a pallbearer at Hopkins’s wife’s funeral the following year. “Mr. Hopkins Off After Visit Here,” Charleston News & Courier, November 27, 1936; “Hopkins Visiting Here,” Charleston News & Courier, October 13, 1937.

36.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

37.

Federal funds covered 90 percent of FERA relief spending in the South compared to 62 percent nationwide. Anthony J. Badger, New Deal/New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 36.

38.

Maybank remained popular during his seven years as mayor from December of 1931 to December of 1938. His strategic backing of popular New Deal projects brought over thirty-six million dollars of federal aid to the Lowcountry between 1933 and 1936 and earned him political support, leading to his victory in the South Carolina gubernatorial election of 1938. Maybank later was elected to the US Senate in 1941, a position he held until his death in 1954. For further discussion of Maybank’s control over New Deal measures in Charleston, see Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and Southern Politics,” in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 97–115; Marvin L. Cann, “Burnet Maybank and Charleston Politics in the New Deal Era,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1979): 39–48; Hayes, South Carolina and the New Deal, 202.

39.

For discussion of local resistance, particularly from landowners, to the Santee-Cooper hydroelectric project, see Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project.”

40.

In an oral interview from the 1990s, Charlestonian Mary Ann Pearlstine recalled a family story in which her grandfather won the Planters’ Hotel in a card game and offered to donate the property to the City of Charleston during the Depression if it would forgive the taxes he owed on the property. “Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Mary Ann Pearlstine Aberman and Edward Aberman,” interview by Dale Rosengarten and Barbara Karesh Stender, September 23, 1999, Mss 1035–222, Special Collections, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina.

41.

“Planters’ Hotel to be Restored,” Charleston News & Courier, February 5, 1935.

42.

“Planters’ Hotel Work is Started,” Charleston News & Courier, February 13, 1935; “Hopkins Praises Grice’s Job Here,” Charleston News & Courier, March 23, 1935.

43.

“Planters’ Hotel is Being Stripped,” Charleston News & Courier, June 19, 1935.

44.

“Planters’ Hotel Work Will Start,” Charleston News & Courier, May 4, 1935; “Planters’ Hotel Project to Begin,” Charleston News & Courier, May 7, 1935; “FERA Head Visits City,” Charleston News & Courier, May 9, 1935; “Work on Theater To Start in Week,” Charleston News & Courier, May 25, 1935; “Planters’ Hotel is Being Stripped,” Charleston News & Courier, June 19, 1935; Planters’ Hotel Debris is Sifted,” Charleston News & Courier, July 5, 1935; “Relics Excavated in Hotel Project,” Charleston News & Courier, August 8, 1935. Workers carted the rotten timber from the site to the wood yard on East Bay Street, where it was sawed into firewood for the poor. For more recent archaeological discoveries of the site, see Zierden et al., “The Dock Street Theatre: Archaeological Discovery and Exploration.”

45.

“Work on Theater to Start in Week,” Charleston News & Courier, May 25, 1935.

46.

In July of 1935, Ellington resigned from the FERA to begin work with the Resettlement Administration, where he became the principal architect of Greenbelt, Maryland, the first planned community constructed by the federal government. However, the assistant administrator of the FERA wrote Mayor Maybank to assure him that while no longer with his agency, Ellington “shall give as much time as necessary for general attention to the Charleston project.” Ellington remained involved in the project throughout its entirety (although the day-to-day work was overseen by local architects Simons and Lapham), and was present at the ceremony marking the commencement of the restoration on August 14, 1935. “Ellington Resign Government Post,” Charleston News & Courier, July 18, 1935; “Start of Theatre Project Marked,” Charleston News & Courier, August 15, 1935.

47.

“Charlestonian Helps Revive Interest in American Architecture,” Charleston News & Courier, December 25, 1938; “American Institute Gives Lapham Honor,” Charleston News & Courier, May 30, 1937; Ralph Muldrow, “Simons & Lapham,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/simons-lapham/; Hosmer, Preservation Comes of Age, 241.

48.

Albert Simons to Emmett Robinson, 20 March 1936, Dock Street Theatre Collection, 1933–1958, Container 21/195, Carolina Art Association Correspondence, 1933–1954, folder 25-195-2 (1937), South Carolina Historical Society [hereafter SCHS].

49.

Simons and Lapham published works of architectural history throughout their careers, including the coedited The Octagon Library of Early American Architecture, Volume I: Charleston, South Carolina (1927), Plantations of the Carolina Low Country (1939), and This Is Charleston (1944).

50.

“Byrnes and Hopkins Speak at Luncheon,” Charleston Evening Post, March 22, 1935; “Hopkins to Dedicate Historic Theater Restored by WPA Workers,” WPA Announcement No. 4–1615, November 21, 1937, RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, MD [hereafter NARA].

51.

Recent archaeological excavations have helped uncover information about the original, modest playhouse on Queen Street. Zierden et al., “The Dock Street Theatre: Archaeological Discovery and Exploration.”

52.

Restoration-style refers to architecture built in England during the period from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 to the end of Charles II’s reign in the 1680s. Erin Shaw, “Preservation Prologue: Albert Simon’s Adaptive Reuse of the Planters’ Hotel as the Dock Street Theatre,” (Seminar Paper, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 1998), pg. 7, Manuscripts, Schulz, C.B., SCL.

53.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

54.

“Planters’ Hotel Project to Begin,” Charleston News & Courier, May 7, 1935; “Planters’ Hotel Details Mapped,” Charleston News & Courier, May 31, 1935; “Fine Restaurant for Dock Street Theatre,” Charleston News & Courier, June 27, 1937. In addition to the auditorium, the architects designed an entrance lobby, dining room and dining cloister, open courtyard, smoking room, bar, dressing rooms, offices, and committee rooms. They also included a green room, traditionally a retiring place for actors, but which would also host lectures, rehearsals, and small concerts. Ellington et al., “Charleston Opens Historic Playhouse with Historic Play,” Architectural Record 83, no. 1 (January 1938).

55.

Tobias, “Charleston Preparing To Reopen Oldest Theater With Historic Play,” State (Columbia, SC), November 14, 1937.

56.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

57.

“Restored Ancient Theater,” State (Columbia, SC), January 24, 1937.

58.

Shaw, “Preservation Prologue,” 9.

59.

Ellington et al., “Charleston Opens Historic Playhouse with Historic Play,” Architectural Record 83, no. 1 (January 1938).

60.

Calgar Aydin, “The Potential of Virtual Heritage Reconstruction in Lost Ansonborough,” (MSc thesis, Clemson University, 2012), 17–23.

61.

Weyeneth, Historic Preservation for a Living City, 6.

62.

When the city approved the demolition of the building to make way for the College of Charleston’s new gymnasium in 1938, it hired Albert Simons to design the new gym. He utilized the old mansion’s masonry walls and the iron fence delineating the property’s perimeter in its construction. “Old High School is Put on Block,” Charleston News & Courier, August 15, 1935; Aydin, “The Potential of Virtual Heritage Reconstruction in Lost Ansonborough,” 18–20.

63.

Heyward, “Dock Street Theatre: Carolina Art Association Management.”

64.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

65.

Collison, “Project Reaches Fruition 3 Years After Inception,” Charleston Evening Post, November 26, 1937.

66.

Brundage, The Southern Past, 208.

67.

Warren Susman, ed., Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1973). While the Dock Street Theatre harkens back to an earlier period of history, the Civil War generally loomed large in New Deal historical projects of the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Silber, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

68.

Heyward, “Dock Street Theatre: Carolina Art Association Management.” Ellen Noonan has described Heyward as “prominent” among Charleston preservationists, “their poet laureate and chief publicist.” The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, 131.

69.

Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1020.

70.

Carolina Art Association, “Untitled,” n.d., pg. 3–4, Dock Street Theatre Collection, 1933–1958, Container 195, Folder 21-195-2 (1937), SCHS.

71.

“Stage Work Done in WPA Theater,” Charleston News & Courier, April 8, 1937.

72.

DuBose Heyward, “Dock Street Theatre: Carolina Art Association, Management,” January 1938, 792, H49, 1938, Oversize, SCL.

73.

“Dock Street Theatre Restored,” State (Columbia, SC), November 24, 1937.

74.

“National Theater Germ Seen Here,” Charleston News & Courier, September 23, 1937.

75.

“Dock Street Theatre Funds Awaited,” Charleston News & Courier, October 10, 1936; “Dock Street Theatre Restoration Halted; “WPA Coin Used Up,” Variety, October 21, 1936; “President Allots Dock Street Fund,” Charleston News & Courier, October 25, 1936; “Theater Project Gets Some Funds,” Charleston News & Courier, November 12, 1936.

76.

“Dock St. Theater Done by Spring,” Charleston News & Courier, November 21, 1936; “Restored Ancient Theater,” State (Columbia, SC), January 24, 1937.

77.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937.

78.

“Hopkins to Dedicate Historic Theater Restored by WPA Workers,” WPA Announcement No. 4–1615, November 21, 1937, RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, NARA.

79.

R. P. Harriss, “Charleston Ponders What to Do with Its New WPA Playhouse,” n.d. [probably early January 1938], RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, NARA.

80.

William Watts [W.W.] Ball became editor of the News & Courier in 1927 and began publicly criticizing Roosevelt’s New Deal program in 1933 in its pages, especially the Santee-Cooper hydroelectric dam. Herbert Ravenel Sass, Outspoken: 150 Years of The News and Courier (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953). For more on his conservative editorship, particularly surrounding issues of race, see Sid Bedingfield, “The White Press and the Dixiecrat Revolt,” in Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935–1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 83–107.

81.

“Ever Been to Jail,” Charleston News & Courier, March 29, 1937.

82.

“$870,000 a Month,” Charleston News & Courier, December 10, 1937.

83.

For example, see Jane De Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).

84.

The other two projects named were the Greenville textile museum and the Columbia art gallery. “WPA Hopes to Keep Artists at Home, National Head Says,” Charleston News & Courier, April 9, 1936.

85.

“Art Association May Run Theater,” Charleston News & Courier, June 19, 1937.

86.

Harold A. Mouzon and Robert N. S. Whitelaw, “Carolina Art Association to Ways and Means Committee, City Council, City of Charleston, SC,” February 4, 1948, Folder 26-35-11, Albert Simons Papers, SCHS; “Playhouse Contract Signed by Maybank,” Charleston News & Courier, November 11, 1937.

87.

Robert N. S. Whitelaw, “Whitelaw Tells of Future Plans,” Charleston News & Courier, December 5, 1937.

88.

Six additional backdrops were created for the comedy. “Charleston of 1838 Shown in Dock Street Scenery,” Charleston News & Courier, November 24, 1937; Rowena Wilson Tobias, “New Dock Street Theater To Repeat Comedy Given More Than 200 Years Ago,” State (Columbia, SC), November 25, 1937.

89.

Alicia Rhett played India Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939). “Alicia Rhett Off for Film Test in North,” Charleston News & Courier, March 14, 1937; Waring, “A Cradle of America’s Theater Will Harbor the Drama Again,” New York Herald Tribune, December 12, 1937.

90.

“Curtains Are Being Hung,” RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, Folder: H.S.—SC—Dock Street Theatre & Planters’ Hotel—Textual,” NARA.

91.

Simons, “Dock St. Theater, Planters Hotel Add to City’s Architectural Wealth,” Charleston News & Courier, November 20, 1937; Writers’ Program of the WPA, South Carolina, 117. The state guidebook describes this work, but did not name Smith, instead referring to him as “an ex-slave” who was “the only artisan considered competent to take charge of the plasterwork in the enlarged clerestory.”

92.

Waring, “A Cradle of America’s Theater Will Harbor the Drama Again,” New York Herald Tribune, December 12, 1937.

93.

William Halsey and Corrie McCallum, interview by Liza Kirwin, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, October 27, 1986, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-william-halsey-and-corrie-mccallum-12465#overview.

94.

The four panels selected were “The Enraged Musician,” “Modern Midnight Conversation,” and two prints from the series of the Rake’s Progress: the “Gaming House Scene” and the “Mad House Scene.” “Halsey Frescoes Theater’s Mural,” Charleston News & Courier, October 3, 1937; Waring, “A Cradle of America’s Theater Will Harbor the Drama Again,” New York Herald Tribune, December 12, 1937.

95.

Three hundred tickets were distributed to patriotic and civic organizations, three hundred to city boards and commissions, two hundred to federal and state officials, fifty to the Charleston city council members and guests, fifty to military units in the Charleston area, fifty to county officials, and fifty to colleges, newspapers, and dramatic critics. “Playhouse Debut Bids Are Issued,” Charleston News & Courier, November 16, 1937.

96.

Aubrey C. Williams, deputy administrator of the Works Progress Administration, was also invited, but was unable to attend the opening. “Hopkins to Give Theater to City,” Charleston News & Courier, November 11, 1937; “Dock Street Theatre Restored,” State (Columbia, SC), November 24, 1937; “Formal Opening Begins Tonight at Dock St. Theater,” Charleston News & Courier, November 26, 1937.

97.

“Hopkins to Dedicate Historic Theater Restored by WPA Workers,” WPA Announcement No. 4–1615, November 21, 1937, RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, NARA.

98.

Carolina Art Association correspondence, n.d., Dock Street Theatre Collection, 1933–1958, Container 21/195–197, SCHS; “Dock Street Theatre Restored,” State (Columbia, SC), November 24, 1937.

99.

“Dock Street Theater Ushers At Formal Opening To Be Cadets and Collegians,” Charleston News & Courier, November 19, 1937; “Souvenirs Will Be Presented at Opening of Dock Street Theater,” Charleston Evening Post, November 26, 1937; R. M. Hitt, Jr., “City’s Culture Made Theater Gift Possible, Hopkins Says,” Charleston News & Courier, November 27, 1937.

100.

Hitt, “City’s Culture Made Theater Gift Possible, Hopkins Says.”

101.

Hitt, “City’s Culture Made Theater Gift Possible, Hopkins Says.”

102.

E. M. Collison, “Performances At Dock St. Theater To Be Repeated,” Charleston Evening Post, November 27, 1937.

103.

“Roosevelt Waits to See Maybank,” Charleston News & Courier, November 29, 1937.

104.

“Charleston Opens Theatre as in 1736,” New York Times, November 27, 1937; “First U.S. Theatre is Restored: Charleston Blue Bloods Give It Gala Opening,” Life, December 20, 1937; Ellington et al., “Charleston Opens Historic Playhouse with Historic Play,” Architectural Record 83, no. 1 (January 1938); Daisy Mae Roberts, “The Dock Street Theatre Rebuilt—A Federal Project,” Scholastic, January 15, 1938, RG 69, Entry 764, Box 11, NARA.

105.

Other organizations that utilized the Dock Street Theatre included the Charleston Garden Club, Thespian Players, Charleston Museum, Ashley Hall, City Federation of Women’s Clubs, Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, Charleston Free Library, St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church, First Church of Christ Scientist, Society of Colonial Wars, and the local chapter of B’nai B’rith. “Dock St. Theater Has Big Season,” Charleston News & Courier, April 9, 1939.

106.

“Experts Advise a Longer Lease,” Charleston News & Courier, February 3, 1938; “WPA Aid Offered Dock St. Theater,” Charleston News & Courier, March 31, 1938.

107.

“Carolina Art Group Gets Rockefeller Aid,” New York Times, November 9, 1939.

108.

“$15,000 Rockefeller Grant Given Dock Street Theater,” Charleston News & Courier, May 24, 1938.

109.

H. P. Lovecraft to Herman Charles Koenig, January 12, 1936, cited in Taylor, Charleston and the Great Depression, 69–71. Lovecraft wrote that Charleston “divides the honours with Quebec as the most distinctive and fascinating city in North America (north of Mexico, at least), and of the two I tend to prefer it in the long run.”

110.

“1736–1937: In Commemoration and Rededication of the Dock Street Theatre,” SCL.