Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston
Sketches and Stories
Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
Growing up in Charleston in the 1930s and 1940s, accomplished storyteller Louis Rubin
witnessed firsthand the subtle gradations of caste and class among neighborhoods,
from south of Broad Street where established families, ancestral glories, and traditional
mores held sway, to the various enclaves of Uptown in which middle-class and bluecollar families went about their own diverse lives and routines. Changing circumstances within his own family impelled his absorption in what seemed to be two separate
worlds, and granted him a remarkable perspective into Charleston’s evolving identity
as an historic seaport on the cusp of modernity during the Great Depression and the
onset of World War II.
In Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston, Rubin draws on equal parts autobiography
and imagination in a series of kinetic episodes that capture the atmosphere of the
Holy City during this era when the population had not yet swelled above sixty-five
thousand, when oldtimers still spoke with awe of the 1886 earthquake, and when the
coming social and economic revolutions that shaped the latter half of the twentieth
century had not yet found a toehold in the old city.
Rubin’s wide-eyed narrator is an earnest and observant guide, who ably takes readers on excursions to and through recognizable landmarks, including Adger’s Wharf,
the Battery, Union Terminal, the shops of King Street, the High School of Charleston,
the Majestic Theater, and the College of Charleston. With youthful glee he watches
the barges and shrimp trawlers along the waterfront, rides streetcars down Rutledge
Avenue and trains to Savannah and Richmond, paddles the Ashley River in a leaky
homemade boat, pitches left-handed for the youngest team in the Twilight Baseball
League, ponders the curious chanting coming from the Jewish Community Center, and
catches magical glimpses of the Morris Island lighthouse from atop the Folly Beach Ferris wheel. His fascination with the gas-electric Boll Weevil train epitomizes his appreciation for the freedom of movement between the worlds of Uptown and Downtown that
defines his youth in Charleston.
Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has been an
author, an editor, a publisher, an artist,
a newspaperman, and a university
professor during his distinguished
career. Rubin has served as chancellor
of the Fellowship of Southern Writers,
president of the Society for the Study
of Southern Literature, and chairman
of the American Literature Section of
the Modern Language Association. Cofounder of Algonquin Books of Chapel
Hill, he has written and edited more
than fifty books.
April 2010, 128 pages
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