WRITER: — PHOTOGRAPHER:
The City’s 50-Year Economic Evolution
In 1977, Michael Bennett was working his way through the College of Charleston as a carpenter’s assistant, helping to renovate buildings the school had acquired nearby. The buildings were cheap and the renovations extensive. He was a gofer, mostly, but learned to demo, hammer studs, and hang drywall. “That was my real education at the College of Charleston,” he says.
Bennett also moonlighted as a bellhop, helped his father raise sunken boats in Charleston Harbor, and worked on a cruise ship. During a trip through New England, he saw folks renting bicycles to tourists and brought the idea home. After leasing a vacant lot near the City Market for $100 a month, he started hawking bikes and mopeds. With the profits, Bennett bought a rundown house for $20,000, converted it into apartments, and bought another. Soon “we were doing a building a month,” Bennett says. “Everything was cheap. Everything needed renovation.”
Today, he owns the Bennett Hotel, among many other properties. It’s a showplace on Marion Square, across the street from where his father, “Red,” once shined shoes. Bennett’s success reflects that of the city itself. In the past 50 years, Charleston has risen from a sleepy Southern port town, stuck in the past and slouching toward shabby, to a world-class tourist destination, cultural touchstone, and, together with its Lowcountry neighbors, a manufacturing powerhouse. “No one could have anticipated this,” Bennett says. “We’ve become international.”
1975 to 1985
In 1975, the year this magazine was founded, Charleston was a much different place. The trappings of historical wealth were still apparent in the antebellum mansions south of Broad, but the facade was thin. Downtown had fallen into disrepair, and the majority of the economy was driven by the huge Navy base and shipyard in North Charleston. Tourism was only a regional draw, drive-ins mostly, from North Carolina and Georgia. What industry that existed was mostly dirty. Terminals and shipyards blocked public access to the waterfront…