The neighbourhood south of Broad Street on the tip of the Charleston peninsula is the city's most architecturally coherent area and its most expensive address. The streets — Legare, Church, Meeting, and the lanes between them — are lined with antebellum mansions, wrought-iron gates, hidden gardens, and the "Charleston single houses" (one room wide, with the front door on the side, facing a garden porch) that are the city's most distinctive domestic form.
Walking here is the best way to understand why Charleston preserved its buildings by accident: after the Civil War, the city was too poor to tear them down and build new ones. The result is a neighbourhood that looks almost exactly as it did in 1860. The Battery seawall forms the southern boundary; Rainbow Row is along the eastern edge; and St. Michael's Church — whose bells were shipped to England and then returned, twice — anchors the Meeting Street end.