Cabbage Row

You know these Cabbage Row addresses, 89–91 Church Street, better as “Catfish Row” of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess (itself based on the book Porgy by the great Charleston [1] author DuBose Heyward, who lived at 76 Church St.).

Today this complex—which once housed 10 families— next to the Heyward-Washington House [2] is certainly upgraded from years past, but the row still has the humble appeal of the tenement housing it once was, primarily for freed African Americans after the Civil War.

The house nearby at 94 Church Street was where John C. Calhoun and others drew up the infamous Nullification Acts that eventually led to the South’s secession.