Rainbow Row and What the Colors Conceal

The thirteen houses along East Bay Street known as Rainbow Row are among the most photographed streetscapes in the American South. They are pastel: pink, yellow, green, peach, blue. They glow in late afternoon light in a way that has appeared in millions of photographs and on an equal number of postcards. They are genuinely beautiful. They were not always this color.

The houses were built in the early seventeen hundreds as merchant stores with residences above. They fronted Charleston's commercial waterfront. Merchants stored goods on the ground floors and conducted business in the same space. The street they sat on was steps from the slave markets where enslaved people were sold and steps from the wharves where the slave ships landed. They existed inside the economic geography of the slave trade without anyone needing to mark that on them, because the entire city was the same geography.

The pastel colors were applied beginning in the nineteen thirties, during a preservation effort that included Susan Pringle Frost, one of the founders of the Preservation Society of Charleston, who bought several of the deteriorated row houses. It was another preservationist on the row, Dorothy Porcher Legge, who painted her house pink. Neighbors followed. The colors are a twentieth-century invention layered on an eighteenth-century commercial waterfront district that served an economy built on human trafficking.

The beauty of Rainbow Row is real. So is what it was built near. The two facts are not in conflict. They are just the same street, seen at different depths.