Hanover Street Garden, 2012 With the East Side fast becoming one of Charleston’s most desirable neighborhoods, it is hard to remember that it was once a place where the city relegated eyesores and polluters. Tanneries released foul odors and noxious liquids into its creeks and marshes. Hogs and cattle were slaughtered at “butcher pens” that supplied meat for the city market. Garbage carts dumped trash in the streets, slowly building up new land from the detritus of life downtown. The city dump, with its flocks of buzzards, gave way to an incinerator that spewed showers of ash. Industrial engines and locomotives alike belched clouds of smoke. In its heyday as an upscale suburb, Hampstead, as it was then known, boasted an expansive park and a handful of palatial homes. It even had a botanical garden, near the site of the now-vacant grocery store many Eastsiders still think of as the Piggly Wiggly. But for almost a century, Hampstead was also the place where Charleston warehoused its poor...
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