Charleston Charms

We were walking west on Broad Street, the busy thoroughfare that has long been the great social divider in Charleston, when our guide, Harlan Green, paused at an obscure doorway set between a law office and an art gallery just a block away from city hall.

"Let's step in here for a moment," he said. "This is one of my favorite places in all of Charleston."

I'd walked past the same doorway probably a dozen times on previous trips to the city-mainly to visit the nearby Blind Tiger Pub, one of the Charleston's numerous former speakeasies-but had never thought it might lead to anything of note. Green, a writer and archivist at the College of Charleston, ushered my wife and me inside; and when the door shut behind us, it was as if we'd sealed off the 21st century and stepped back to the 1860s-to that era not long after young cadets from the Citadel fired cannons upon Union troops stationed at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, and famously set off the Civil War.

We looked out on a long courtyard lined with crepe myrtles and magnolias, a place fairly dripping with sweetness and gentility. A three-story L-shaped dormitory-style building ran the length of the courtyard, lined with several dozen apartments that opened onto narrow porches. Established shortly after the end of the Civil War as the Confederate Home and College, the place served as a residence for Confederate war widows until the 1950s. While a few of its apartments have since been turned into studios and workspaces for writers and artists, including acclaimed Charleston-born novelist Josephine Humphreys (Dreams of Sleep and Rich in Love), it continues to provide a home for women "of a certain age, of good standing and lacking sufficient means," said Green. "Essentially, the women who now live here are widows or spinsters who come from good, old Charleston families, but who might not have the wherewithal to maintain places of their own. A private foundation oversees the home. It's truly one of the last vestiges of that old Southern way of life."

As if on cue, one of the ground-level apartment doors opened near us, and out came a white-haired woman using an aluminum walker, a straw shopping bag dangling from it. She was dressed as if to go to church, complete with a hat. She smiled sweetly at us, then closed her eyes and sniffed the air. "Ah, the jasmine is glorious, isn't it?" she said.

It was a scene that could only play out in Charleston, the most gracious of all Southern cities. My wife and I started visiting here on a regular basis several years ago, when our younger son began attending the College of Charleston. Founded in 1770 and one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the U.S., the college, located just a block off kinetic King Street, boasts a lovely oak-shrouded campus whose historic buildings and halls provided some of the backdrop for the Mel Gibson film The Patriot.

Even after our son finished school here, we kept coming back to Charleston, drawn by a number of compelling features. It's a gorgeous place, built on a human scale and, with its main peninsula just six miles long and a mile wide, a great city for walking. The food is exceptional, from Low Country cuisine, with its shrimp 'n' grits and she-crab soup to straightforward seafood and fusion fare. And no matter how many times we visit, Charleston seems to offer some new surprise.

On our most recent trip, we stayed at 440-room Charleston Place, a majestic accommodation run by esteemed Orient-Express Hotels. Straddling Meeting and King streets, with its grand lobby opening onto an arcade of high-end shops, Charleston Place offers a calm and luxurious refuge from the crowds that often swarm the city, starting with May's Spoleto Festival, the opera-theater-dance-music extravaganza, through the hot-hot summer.

The hotel's Charleston Grill, home to renowned chef Bob Wagonner, boasts some of the most daring dishes in town, with Low Country specialties tweaked by French influences in such menu items as seared lamb sweetbreads over truffled grits and Waggoner's version of the classic local Frogmore stew, with shrimp, homemade andouille sausage, crabmeat and corn simmered in a shellfish broth. Waggoner even tops one of his dishes with a memorable sherry vinegar and hog-jowl vinaigrette.

On the evening we were there, Wagonner worked the crowd, making his way table-to-table, basking in praise. "I'm constantly changing the menu, looking for ways to show off the local fare in new ways," he said. "You can't rest on your laurels here. Charleston is a city that takes its eating seriously, just as seriously as New Orleans."

Indeed, I look back fondly on any number of exceptional meals I've enjoyed in Charleston, from breakfasts at the Bookstore Cafe (fried green tomatoes topped with crabmeat and poached eggs) and lunches at Hominy Grill (pimento cheese and arugula sandwiches) to exceptional northern Italian dinners at cozy, elegant Fulton Five. And that's just in Charleston proper. Head out to nearby Folly Beach, Mt. Pleasant or Sullivan's Island and there's plenty in the way of seafood, especially during the cooler months when local oysters are at their very best.

With all the good eats, you have to work it off with plenty of walking, which is the absolute best way to see Charleston. In our past visits, my wife and I thought we'd done a good job on our own of touring the city, making our way up and down all narrow streets that lead past the grand homes south of Broad and along the Battery's Rainbow Row. There are any number of horse-drawn carriage tours that debark from Market Street and the old Slave Market complex, now a warren of arts and crafts vendors. But they seemed more odiferous, and touristy, than we desired. So we asked the concierge at Charleston Place to recommend a private guide who could show us the city on foot, and a few hours later we were heading off with Harlan Green.

It was if we were suddenly seeing the city with brand-new eyes. We had often noticed various adornments on some of the older homes-wrought-iron pineapples, lion's heads and the like-and dismissed them as fanciful decorations. "Earthquake bolts," said Green. "Back in 1886, a terrible earthquake tore up much of the city, and the grander homes were thereafter re-enforced with these giants bolts that ran in between floors the length of the house. The adornments that you see are merely to hide the head of an ugly piece of hardware."

We walked along Tradd Street, named after the family of the first child born in Charleston; soaked up the lore at many of the notable churches (including a few scandalous affairs involving gadabout ministers); and learned that during the Civil War the steeple on St. Phillip's Episcopal Church, once the tallest point in old Charleston, was painted black so that Union gunners couldn't sight in on it when they shelled the city.

We eventually found ourselves at yet another courtyard, where Green had us step off the street and take a look inside. Turns out it was once the home of Edwin DuBose Heyward, the Charleston insurance-salesman-turned-author who, inspired by the bawdy life along the city's "Catfish Row," wrote a slim little novel named Porgy. It eventually inspired George Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess.

"Gershwin came to visit Edwin DuBose Heyward and was so taken by this particular courtyard that it was later recreated in the first stage shows of Porgy and Bess," Green told us.

I turned to my wife and began intoning the opening bars to Bess, You Is My Woman Now. But she and Harlan Green quickly took off, anxious to see what other Charleston wonders awaited us further down the street.

IF YOU GO

With its central location between King and Meeting streets, the elegant Charleston Place offers 440 rooms, suites and Club Level accommodations. Rates start at around $250 per night for a standard room and $495 for a junior suite. Operated by Orient Express Hotels, it's also the home of the award-winning Charleston Grill, where chef Bob Waggoner dishes out his acclaimed fusion of Low Country and French fare. Visit www.charlestonplace.com.