Slow dance with Charleston

They got very little done.

Summertime

That secret is starting to slip out. Tourism here is booming, up from 3.2 million visitors in 1997 to 4.7 million 2004, and the onetime summer "low-season" hotel rates in the city are starting to disappear. The gap between the peak spring home-garden tours and the fall conventions has closed, mostly filled by family vacationers.

A family reunion on Sullivans Island, about 15 miles east, brought me to the area just as summer was starting, and I decided to linger for four more days in a town whose history and character are as contrarian as its cuisine is tantalizing.

With my family, I got my first overview on a one-hour carriage tour. The city has divvied up the historic district into four routes, and only 20 total carriages can be out at any one time. But it's such a popular tourist activity that on a weekend afternoon, carriages back up on Market Street and down Anson Street like airliners queued up at LAX.

Waiting for our tour to start, we ambled through the open-air Old City Market, which was full of souvenirs: watercolor paintings, photographs and coiled sweet-grass baskets that women weave in the shade of outdoor umbrellas. I'm not a trinket buyer, but I walked out of the market wearing a woven straw hat with a 3-inch brim. A good shade hat isn't an accessory here; it's an essential.

Our midday carriage tour meandered through the streets south of Broad, the tip of the peninsula where most of the city's oldest and grandest houses stand. Charleston boomed in its first 50 years, becoming the fourth-largest city in the American Colonies. It quickly became the wealthiest too as a result of its slave-plantation economy and thriving port, which shipped millions of pounds of rice to England.

At Broad and King streets, we passed the John Lining House, thought to be one of the oldest in the city. Like others surviving from the Colonial period, it has no foundation, so its sits practically atop the sidewalk. The distinctive single houses are tall and skinny, only one room wide, and perfectly scaled to the one-lane streets. The oval bronze plaques affixed to houses indicate whether a resident paid for insurance and which fire company would fight a blaze at that address.