We wanted to take a moment to congratulate our wonderful neighbors, the Footlight Players, on receiving a Historic Preservation Award from the State of South Carolina for their stewardship of the Queen Street Playhouse.
The award recognizes something we get to appreciate every day: the incredible care the Footlight Players have taken in preserving their historic Queen Street home while continuing to fill it with creativity, community, and life.
As their neighbors just a few doors down, this one feels especially meaningful to us. The theater is right on the corner of Philadelphia Alley, perhaps that most lovely hidden treasure in Charleston, where I get to walk nearly daily.
Our little stretch of Queen Street is filled with buildings that have lived many lives. They have weathered centuries, earthquakes, hurricanes, countless businesses and generations of Charlestonians. And yet, if they are cared for properly, they continue to serve as places where people gather, make things, tell stories and hopefully leave a little magic behind.
We are thinking about that quite a bit these days.
As many of you know, the gallery is currently undergoing some fairly extensive renovations and preservation work of its own. Our building has been standing on Queen Street for well over a century, and right now there is scaffolding, brickwork, dust, noise and all the other less glamorous ingredients that go into making sure an old Charleston building gets to become an even older Charleston building.
Watching the Footlight Players receive this award feels like a wonderful reminder of why all of that work matters. We hope that, many years from now, we can say that we preserved and cared for our home as graciously as they have cared for theirs—not simply preserving an old building, but keeping it alive and relevant as a place for the arts.
Over the years, we’ve also had the pleasure of partnering with the Footlight Players on plenty of fun theater events and creative collaborations. One of the things we love most about Queen Street is how naturally the different arts organizations here spill into one another. Painters wander into theaters, actors wander into galleries, audiences become collectors, collectors become audience members, and before long it all feels like one wonderfully interconnected creative neighborhood.
We hope there are many more collaborations ahead.
Historic preservation is ultimately about much more than saving bricks and mortar. It is about preserving the places where memories are made—and then making sure new memories continue to happen inside them.
Congratulations to everyone at the Footlight Players: the artists, actors, volunteers, staff, board members and supporters who have helped care for the Queen Street Playhouse and keep its stages alive.
We’re very lucky to call you neighbors.
And from one old building to another: here’s to the next hundred years.
