Feature: House Rules

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Quality of life issues must rank high in a city where newspaper stories analyze the color of a parking garage or detail the controversy over whether a drugstore’s façade harmonizes with its neighboring storefronts. Such is the case in the pristine architectural zone that makes up the historic district of downtown Charleston. Here, homeowners are not only beholden to their jobs, which pay their mortgages, and to their banks, which own the mortgages, but also to a third resident in their daily lives—a sometimes unwelcome guest, like the second cousin who stays a little too long in the carriage house: the Board of Architectural Review. As an entity that monitors and enforces the preservation codes that govern what can and can’t be done to the exterior of a historic home, the BAR, as it’s known, may well be the most powerful civic authority in the city of Charleston.

Oddly, it owes its existence to a historical accident. After the Civil War, the old-name Charleston families who lived on the peninsula weren’t able to afford the upkeep on their houses. In the well-used cliché, they were too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash. So the old dwellings languished in another kind of cliché—a sort of languorous Southern limbo, their paint flecked away by the salt air, their piazzas sagging from jerry-built repairs.

Then another war came along—World War I. But this one had the opposite effect. It infused cash into the local economy and revitalized commerce. The result, however, wasn’t necessarily positive. The newly flush citizenry was all for embracing the modern and keeping up with the rest of the country. People wanted to demolish the rather unsightly old structures and replace them with shiny new gasoline stations, widen roads to accommodate the newfangled automobiles, and sell off to out-of-town collectors some of the most prized interior details of their decayed mansions: an Adam mantel here, a cypress doorway there. The architectural palace that was old Charleston was in danger of becoming an empty husk.

In response, concerned citizens founded the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings in 1921 and set Charleston’s historic preservation movement in motion. The city became the first in America to adopt a Zoning Ordinance protecting historic structures. Twenty-three square blocks of the lower peninsula were identified as the Old and Historic District and were protected by city statutes. Other cities followed suit—old town Alexandria, Virginia, enacted a “Charleston Ordinance” in 1946 with the same goals in mind, as did New Orleans a little later on.

The BAR came into being in 1931. It was the brainchild of Albert Simons, a native son and prominent architect who was to have a hand in virtually all of the major renovation projects in historic Charleston over the next 50 years. The BAR that Simons established, however, bore only a family resemblance to what it is today. In its early years, it didn’t enforce codes. Instead, Simons ran the BAR as an “architectural free clinic,” as he put it. The city statutes that created it specifically prohibited the members from considering “detailed designs” in making decisions. Its role was largely advisory, and it had no power to stop demolitions. It oversaw a small area, bounded roughly by Broad, Logan/Lenwood, South Battery, and East Bay streets. It held no regularly scheduled meetings.

For about 40 years, the BAR operated quietly in the recesses of city government, as just another municipal office that tended to the upkeep of the city infrastructure. But Joseph Riley’s election as mayor in 1975 turned new attention to the BAR and gave it more prominence in civic life as Charleston began to grow. The way for this had been partly paved in 1966 when the original Zoning Ordinance was changed and a new set of zoning laws created. These laws nearly tripled the size of the Old and Historic District, added two members to the board (seven now serve at the request of the mayor and with the approval of City Council), limited their terms, and gave them the power to deny demolition of any building built prior to 1860. The BAR then entered a kind of transition period where every year it seemed to take a more deliberate—some would say invasive—role in accepting or rejecting site improvements.

The turning point in the BAR’s power came in 1974 when the city produced a new Historic Preservation Plan and did an architectural survey of historically significant buildings. The objectives of the BAR then changed from saving individual dwellings to preserving whole neighborhoods. Riley gave the BAR a new urban prominence. It was even recommended that the actual board be disbanded and in its place installed a Historic Commission with more statutory powers—an agency that would have powers of eminent domain, the authority to buy and sell historic properties, and control of funds to finance such dealings.

That didn’t happen, but the city did extend the Old and Historic District again— this time to north of Calhoun. Radcliffeborough and Wraggborough, as well as other areas below Calhoun Street, were included. An Old City District was also created, south of Line Street down to Calhoun, that was also subject to certain restrictions. And 10 years later, in 1984-85, a second architectural survey was done, pulling in properties as far north as the Crosstown Expressway. At this point, the BAR was also given authority to forbid demolition of any structure more than 75 years old on the peninsula south of Mount Pleasant Street.

Today’s Board

Over the last 30 years as construction and renovation have boomed, the BAR has made its presence felt with many downtown homeowners, and the relationship hasn’t always been cordial. Some like to say, half-seriously, that they own the inside of their house but the BAR owns the outside.

Eddie Bello, a native Charlestonian who practiced architecture here for 13 years before going to work for the city as liaison to the BAR seven years ago, disagrees with such talk. He is quick to point out that most applications are routine matters that are approved by staff and don’t even have a public hearing—such as painting, for instance, the most common request. Bello says, “People come into our office all the time asking to see the ‘BAR approved’ paint colors. There is no such thing.” The BAR reviews the colors, Bello adds, but it doesn’t dictate what the colors must be. Similarly, Bello says he’s often asked “why the BAR designed such a building.” It doesn’t design buildings, he responds; rather, it works with the plans that owners and architects present, helping to shape the best possible result. Most hearings involving residences, Bello notes, are sparsely attended and usually there aren’t any confrontations of the government-versus-the individual sort.

When more complex issues arise, however, the board, as a whole, has held a hard line against aesthetic compromises. One of its most difficult tests came after Hurricane Hugo, when many property owners had to wrangle with insurance companies and out-of-town contractors who didn’t want to repair damaged structures with high- quality replacement materials. But the BAR stuck to its longstanding position: What was right for the city and its citizens before the storm remained so after the storm. Given the widespread damage, the city might not look the way it does today had the BAR made the exceptions it was being pressured to at the time.
But what of situations in which a homeowner can’t afford to replace original materials—like some wooden columns, which can quickly rot in the humid climate—or a metal roof? In these cases, agreement isn’t always easy. Sandy Logan, an architect with LS3P Associates, who just completed two terms on the board, sees compromise as necessary if the city is to preserve the goodwill of its citizens and promote a citywide philosophy of preserving its uniqueness. To Logan, for example, there’s nothing wrong with enclosing a porch on a single house—a common request—so long as it’s reversible and its height, mass, and scale are proportionate. Says Logan, “Our whole pattern of living is different today than it was long ago, and the houses we live in need to realistically reflect that. It’s a livability issue.”

Some residents choose to do the work without BAR approval, and in many cases these people have had to tear out the work and start again at considerable cost. Logan recalls one heated incident in which the owner of a tiny single house had built a brick driveway entrance and wall “like the front of Versailles”—wildly out of kilter with the scale of the house. The homeowner was cited and the work, after review by the board, was rejected and may have to be torn down.

Few government offices deal with such rarefied issues as aesthetic taste, and that’s a matter that is sometimes hard to define. Harmony means different things to different people, says Logan, whose first employer was Albert Simons himself. Simons, Logan says, “understood the bones of old buildings,” and the BAR tries to follow his philosophy of determining whether site improvements “have the right cadence, the right rhythm to fit the context. Out-of-town architects sometimes don’t understand this. They haven’t studied the neighborhood.” The ordinances, Logan says, were written loosely on purpose, to allow for aesthetic latitude, not to create binding, proscriptive measures: “In Beaufort, for example, there’s a manual that says, ‘You can do this; you can’t do that.’ We don’t operate that way.”

Nonetheless, to an increasing number of homeowners it’s a question of property rights. Bello notes that many of the homes downtown today are owned by people who only live there part-time and that these people don’t necessarily “understand the unique character of the city.” Yet, if it’s private property, can’t one do whatever one wants to it? The state and local laws that created the BAR have at times been challenged as unconstitutional. The ordinances could be seen as taking private property for public use without just compensation first being made. There is also the issue that the BAR only has jurisdiction over property visible from public streets—an arbitrary standard that would, hypothetically, allow one to do anything one pleased if that part of the house was hidden from view. How is that, some ask, “historic preservation?”

“It’s just not ours to do with as we please,” contends Logan. “We are stewards of Charleston’s architectural environment and have a responsibility to safeguard that for the future.” Bello notes that eventually most residents “recognize that it’s ‘right’ for the city”—and that anyway, they probably wouldn’t choose to live in Charleston unless they had that understanding to begin with. “The majority of residents are actually very supportive of the role of the BAR in maintaining our historic resources,” he says.

The Road Ahead

The BAR will encounter some rough patches in coming years. The city is currently updating the 1974 preservation plan and trying to get a purchase on some slippery issues. How, for example, will it review developments in areas outside the peninsula, especially commercial ones? There’s a move afoot to extend BAR jurisdiction to older neighborhoods west of the Ashley, like Old Windermere, Riverland Terrace, and Avondale, as well as to the northwest areas around Hampton Park and Wagener Terrace. Bello thinks that some monitoring needs to be done here, but, at least initially, more in demolition reviews than building alterations.

Also, the BAR’s support base has been aided by a strong mayor, but Joseph Riley will not be in office forever. And will it be able to retain the support of the citizens? The same people who clamored for its creation might someday call for its disbandment if it’s seen as losing sight of its charge.

The official city seal, adopted in 1760, reads: “She guards her buildings, her customs, and her laws.” It’s true that few cities in America so dearly embrace their architectural heritage. And in large part, the existence of the BAR has made Charleston a small environmental miracle, since it has kept its main residential neighborhood in the inner city, going against the trend toward suburban exodus which has dominated most cities since the 1950s. As time goes on, the challenge will be to sustain historic preservation while acknowledging the realities of economic pressures and an increasingly diverse culture.