Rainbow Row

Where it sits. Rainbow Row is a run of thirteen adjoining houses on the western side of East Bay Street in Charleston, South Carolina, numbered 79 to 107, between Tradd Street and Elliott Street at the southern end of the peninsula. It is a five-minute walk north of the Battery and White Point Garden, and two minutes from the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon. The houses are pastel-painted, three and four storeys, flush to the pavement with no front gardens, and they share party walls the entire length of the block. Behind them, hidden from the street, are the walled courtyards and side piazzas that are the real currency of Charleston domestic architecture. The stretch is generally described as the longest continuous group of Georgian rowhouses in the United States.

The story behind it. The buildings went up in stages between roughly 1740 and 1845, and the earliest of them predate the American Revolution. Their original logic is invisible today because the geography has changed: when they were built, the Cooper River came up almost to their back doors, and the ground behind them was wharves and marsh rather than the filled land that now carries East Bay Street's traffic and the Waterfront Park. They were merchant premises — counting rooms and stores at street level, opening onto the docks, with the family's living quarters on the floors above. As the port's centre of gravity shifted north and the peninsula filled in, the block lost its purpose. By the years after the Civil War the houses were tenements, and photographs from the 1920s show them derelict, with collapsing cornices and boarded openings.

How they got their colours. The pastels are not colonial. In 1931 Dorothy Porcher Legge and her husband Lionel bought 99 and 101 East Bay, restored them, and painted the stucco a soft pink drawn from a Caribbean colonial palette. Neighbours restoring their own houses through the 1930s and 1940s followed with blues, greens, yellows and a peach, and the block acquired its collective nickname. This was Colonial Revival taste, not eighteenth-century practice, and it belongs to the same wave of Charleston preservation that produced the Preservation Society of Charleston in 1920 and, in 1931, the country's first municipal historic-district zoning ordinance and Board of Architectural Review — a genuine legal first that is more historically significant than the paint. Two persistent stories about the colours are folklore invented later: that the shades were coded so illiterate merchants and sailors could find the right shop, and that the pale finishes were chosen to keep interiors cool. Neither has documentary support.

On screen. The row functions on screen as a face rather than a stage. Every house is a private residence, so productions film it from the public street: it appears in establishing shots, walk-and-talks and title sequences rather than in interior scenes. Charleston as a whole has become one of the most heavily used period locations in the American South since the state's film incentives arrived, hosting The Patriot (2000), The Notebook (2004), Dear John (2010), the long-running series Army Wives (2007-2013) and more recently Outer Banks, whose Outer Banks of North Carolina are in fact the Charleston Lowcountry. When any of these needs a shorthand image for the city, East Bay Street's pastel block is what they reach for, which is why the row is far more recognisable than it is filmable.

What you actually see today. All thirteen houses are lived in, and they are the reason visitors are asked to stay on the pavement and off the steps. Look for the details rather than the colours: the Georgian doorcases with pedimented surrounds, the fanlights, the wrought-iron boot scrapers set into the entrance treads, the flagstone kerbs, and the narrow side alleys that give glimpses of piazzas and courtyard gardens. Number 79 dates to the 1740s and 83 to the 1780s; several carry earthquake bolts, the iron plates and rods driven through Charleston houses to tie them together after the 1886 earthquake, which appear as crosses, stars and discs on the facades. The whole block sits within the Charleston Old and Historic District, a National Historic Landmark district.

Getting there and timing. East Bay Street runs the length of the lower peninsula and is easily walked from anywhere south of Broad Street; the free DASH shuttle and street parking are both close by. There is no admission and nothing to book. Photographers work the row in the morning, when the eastern sun hits the facades directly and the colours are truest; by midafternoon the block is in its own shadow and the tour carriages are queueing. Spring, roughly mid-March to early May, brings jasmine and wisteria over the courtyard walls and the most pleasant weather of the year; late summer is hot, humid and prone to afternoon storms and tidal street flooding on East Bay. The pavement is narrow and the historic kerbs are high, so wheelchair users will find the block passable but tight, and there is no public interior access anywhere along it.