Through past decades in Charleston, children cut their teeth on corner stores.

Consider the blocks clustered in the lower peninsula in the 1970s, when local kids would hop from one corner to the next to sate their youthful aims.

They'd get a cold Coke from Pete’s Grocery Store, a well-worn, well-loved little shop at 58 Meeting St. on the southeast corner of Tradd Street that was a neighborhood staple for, well, staples, like fresh produce and cold soft drinks.

They'd put air in bicycle tires at the Boxx Service Station, a trim white box sporting gas pumps that brightly angled out from the southwest corner of King and Tradd streets. Over on Broad Street at Logan, they'd stroll into Lakeside-Schwettman Drug Store, met with a booming hello from Dr. Felder, the pharmacist and owner behind the tall counter.

Further west where Broad met Savage, Mr. Burbage would guide children to whatever ingredient was needed for dinner.

They could wheel up to the wonderfully musty spot at Queen and Logan (now Queen Street Grocery) for candy necklaces and watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers.

For peninsular kids, these places meant more than the promise of never-ending sweets and road-ready bike tires. As proof: In 1975, many were cut to the quick on learning that Pete’s was set to close. An impassioned throng of particularly Quixotic kids even banded together outside in protest. They succeeded in making the evening news, but not in holding off the tides of change.

Was the Pete's protest a case of early onset nostalgia? Probably not. 

Joe Watson (copy)

Joseph Watson behind the counter of his sweet shop in Hampstead Village. Watson's mother, Mary, opened the store as a restaurant 63 years ago. Gavin McIntyre/Staff

In past eras, corner stores were community cornerstones. They were a ubiquitous urban form of neighborhood commerce, the supporting joints of neighborhood blocks, the easy, breezy, friendly foothold where everyone met in the middle.

It wasn’t a South of Broad thing. On the East Side, corner stores like Mary’s Sweet Shop on America and Amherst streets have long been the keeper of the neighborhood's culture. Ansonborough and Cannonborough-Elliottborough were once major commercial hubs, peppered with all manner of merchants. On the West Side, before Harold’s Cabin was a popular boite, it served locals as the go-to grocer.

And other small businesses, like gas stations and the tiny sweet shops that served as offices and retail spaces, punctuated peninsular blocks, too. 

In separate corners

Recently, the corner store has gained an altogether different role in an ever-changing Charleston, often dividing neighbors rather than bringing them together.

A prime example was the heated debate around 80 Ashley Ave., the little brick building that has sat empty for ages. There, restaurant owners hatched a plan to rehab it into a cafe and garden shop. The rub? That charming vision required a zoning use variance, as it had fallen out of commercial status.

In the case of this and other corner stores, the battleground outpost is the city Board of Zoning Appeals. On most first and third Tuesdays of the month, under the glaring florescent light of the city's public meeting room at 2 George Street, opposing factions congregate in rows of none-too-comfy seats, armed with legions of allies, piles of plaintive letters and sheaths of petitions teeming with the signatures they’ve amassed door-to-door and Facebook post-to-post.

Winslow Hastie, President & CEO of Historic Charleston Foundation, often finds himself in the fray, endorsing the appeals of corner-store hopefuls. A Charleston native, he also enjoyed his fair share of Charms Blow Pops at Boxx’s or other such treats at Burbage’s, and is an advocate of these enterprises.

The nub of the debate is the current zoning ordinance. A commercial space that has not operated continuously loses its zoning after three years. Prospective business owners must apply for a variance. Hastie said residents in many areas downtown can be deeply averse to anyone getting a variance to regain that status.

Often summed up as driven by NIMBYism, or “not in my backyard,” the variance-opposed rail against a perceived increase in noise, trash, traffic and parking problems. Hastie recalls first seeing the shift when studying nineteenth-century Ansonborough, which was filled with cobblers and meat markets.

“It turned itself inside-out,” he said, explaining that the neighborhoods have flipped to residential use. According to Hastie, such residents have now come to fear so much as a garden and cafe, worried it will soon devolve into booze-fueled bacchanal. 

Instead, many downtown residents seem more inclined to embrace a gated community ethos, with a zero tolerance stance on non-residential activity, often stemming from a concern that it will be a slippery slope.

The urban-suburban flip

According to Hastie, the crux of the concerns at the zoning process is summed up in the word "livability." To some residents, a corner store could threaten their hold on it. That leads them to feel it might threaten their real estate investment, too.

“You could make a very strong argument that a livable community is walkable,” said Hastie, meaning one that offers access to amenities like a coffee shop, a florist or a carton of half-and-half within 5 to 10 minutes.

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Even more curious is the strange transposition of the urban and suburban. As denizens of urban areas vigorously campaign to reconfigure Charleston blocks to all-residential, many suburban developments have conversely replicated the urban experience.

Think I’On in Mount Pleasant, with its intentional peppering of walkable shops and eateries, or Daniel Island. Both proudly champion new urbanism, the design approach extolling such mixed-use.

In his 2019 book "Charleston Fancy," architect Witold Rybczynski explores this practice throughout the city, explaining that the planning is "based on walkability and visual diversity, and emphasizes neighborhood features such as scale, density and the pedestrian experience" that call for "a compact mix of residential, commercial and civic uses."

Among those featured is Reid Burgess, a house restorer, designer and infill developer, who embraced new urbanism in Cannonborough-Elliottborough in developing the 1-acre Catfiddle Street in the block below the Septima P. Parkway Expressway between Ashley and Rutledge avenues. Partnering with George Holt in Urban Ergonomics, they conceived it to enfold intentionally differing looks in its residences to replicate the organic feeling of a town.

For Burgess, the corner is key. “In cities, the most vital space of all is often the street corner. When a corner is dead it has a strange negative impact on the length of the street for quite a distance, or even the entire block,” he said.

Burgess points out that Catfiddle Street shares the block with Chasing Sage, a restaurant at the nexus of Rutledge Avenue and the expressway. Adjacent to it is another independent enterprise, the slim mini-brewery Guilded Horn.

“In some places that are commercially very vibrant, like Cannon and Spring Streets have become lately, if an intersection doesn’t have at least one good commercial corner the whole block will feel less lively,” he said.

Dynamic as the neighborhood may be, Hastie points out that in downtown Charleston, “Cannonborough-Elliottborough is a unicorn."

Connecting community

Proponents of mixed-use planning often focus on creating opportunities for human interaction in a way that bolsters community, which is thought to be a component of quality livability. 

Take the near-mystical powers of neighborhood stores in New York City. In Chelsea, a video store named Alan’s Alley that was mid-block had cultivated an uncanny pull for its surrounding neighborhood, so much so it has been followed in The New York Times.

Its amiable owner, Alan Sklar, was prepared to do anything to best serve his community. He sold neighbors’ furniture on consignment, as well as Fiesta tableware, which perched with haphazard, unapologetic cheer on shelves amid rows and rows of dog-eared videotape boxes. He also installed a large photocopying machine, charging a modest fee for those needing a quick copy.

Sklar kept biscuits on hand for dogs, who frequently strained their leash at the sight of his shop. Every other available space was papered with fliers, announcing nearby events and rallying locals to band together to stem encroaching development. The store was where you caught wind of the neighborhood scuttlebutt. One might venture to guess Sklar was a notary public, too.

Alan’s Alley bobbed and weaved with the countless, nameless New Yorkers who converged in a few compressed city blocks, both serving and setting the tone for community spirit. The most formidable Manhattanites cast off their guards within those manically stocked, merry walls.

conNECKtedTOO public art (copy)

A sculpture that was part of artists Gwylene Gallimard's and Jean-Marie Mauclet's conNECKtedTOO incorporates small businesses around Charleston. ConNECKtedTOO/Provided

In Charleston, conNECKtedTOO, a project folding in art, culture, community and economic development, advocates for such “tiny businesses,” as it calls them.

Operating as the Charleston Rhizome Collective, the project was conceived by artists Jean-Marie Mauclet and Gwylene Gallimard. Its mantra "Tiny Is Powerful!" underscores that just because a commercial enterprise is tiny or historic does not mean that it is not trading in present-day agency.

When it comes to small businesses, the artists have walked the walk. In the 1970s they opened Gaulart & Maliclet, the French cafe on Broad Street now owned by their former employees that remains a community hub.

Mauclet said that these businesses embody “the most urgent, complex and universal socio-economic issues: belonging, identity, commerce, profit, in an order of decreasing importance.” He also cautions that their association with nostalgia can be an obstacle to identifying their vital role in a city.

That assertion has resonated. In 2017, it was the only South Carolina project recognized by a nationwide consortium of philanthropic investors by way of an Art Place America grant of $300,000.

Burgess, the infill developer, believes the pandemic has also put a spotlight on the importance of corner stores to communities. “Convenient turned into essential during COVID-19.” he said.

It could also be argued that during the pandemic they also became more essential to human interaction, or belonging, as conNECKtedTOO would say. In Cannonborough-Elliottborough, neighbors often converse on the socially distanced sidewalk outside Sugar Bakeshop or from an outdoor picnic table at Xiao Bao Biscuit.

Hastie is focusing his efforts on amending that corner store-crushing zoning ordinance. His hope is that, moving forward, other properties won’t irretrievably elude commercial status.

"We need to figure out a way to not make it an automatic reversion to the underlying zoning," said Hastie, noting that such a provision would create more opportunities for commercial use, particularly in a historic commercial building.

With such collective efforts, perhaps the little shop on the corner will rise again. Then, if in spirit only, those once-defeated Pete’s picketers will at long last have the means to save a little corner of their world.

Follow Maura Hogan on Twitter at @msmaurahogan.

Maura Hogan is the arts critic at The Post and Courier. She has previously written about arts, culture and lifestyle for The New York Times, Gourmet, Garden & Gun, among other publications.

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