1 week Ago
The newest public spaces in Charleston's Shadowmoss neighborhood aren't your typical city parks: They feature waist-high native plants rather than manicured lawns, and their gravel trails wind past ditches and sunken ponds accented with gray, dead tree trunks. There's also no playground equipment, though some is on the way. But the main reason these places look so different is that their primary job isn't to serve as a public gathering spot or recreational area.
It's to collect and store rainwater, then release it slowly, over time. These places are out of the ordinary for another reason: They're created on land where homes once stood — homes that flooded so often that the government decided it would be wise to buy them, tear them down and create a sort of retention pond in their place. Charleston City Councilman Stephen Bowden approaches the 2 Loch Place bridge to what had been the Bridgepointe Townhomes.
The city is now putting the finishing touches on a natural park area there. City Councilman Stephen Bowden has had a front-row seat as they took shape; he lives just a few football tosses away from the new park at Mowler Court and Wolk Drive . The city's contractor is still putting on some finishing touches, and some orange-and-white construction barrels and silt fencing still decorate the edges.
But they're finished enough to get a sense of what they will look like. When Charleston's leaders returned from the Netherlands several years ago and launched the Dutch Dialogues, there was a lot of talk of "living with water," reshaping the city with new infrastructure that managed flooding while also providing other benefits, such as parking, recreation or wildlife habitat. Shadowmoss' new places are some of the first things built following that talk.
The neighborhood sits in the Church Creek drainage basin, a vast, open area that doesn't lend itself to engineered solutions such as the deep tunnels and pump stations being built downtown. Instead, the solution here involves redeveloping certain parcels to hold more stormwater so it doesn't back up as much on its way toward Church Creek, the Ashley River and ultimately the ocean. The new city park emerging where 28 oft-flooded townhomes in Shadowmoss once stood features trails and natural-looking retention ponds and soon will include a small playground.
While the city has created these new park spaces to do that, a next step might be working with the golf course to enlarge and deepen its canals and ponds. And while Bowden and his neighbors are benefiting from this slow evolution, the human benefit from these spaces has been a sore spot at times. The original notion that these parks would not need maintenance has gone out the window, after weeds in one section grew tall enough to consume a street sign.
"There were a million of them," Bowden says. "It got bad." Even with the maintenance, their design is essentially a slice of nature.
The dead tree trunks were installed to create habitat for bugs and birds, and the new habitat is a nod in part to where the money came from to build them: the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation . "With an unlimited amount of money, there are unlimited options, but that's not what we're looking at," Bowden adds. "But a couple of months ago, a lot of the plants bloomed.
It looked great." The far larger park has taken shape just across the bridge at 2 Loch Place, the former site of the infamous Bridgepointe Townhomes , the neighborhood's lowest lying point. These townhomes should never have been built and only were because of a mapping error.
All 32 owners sold, and when Bowden visited the site this week, it was full of herons, egrets, ducks and geese. It has a few short, scenic trails, and the city is planning to install new playground equipment on the highest spot soon. Charleston City Councilman Stephen Bowden, left, walks past a crew putting the finishing touches on a new raingarden-like park near his Shadowmoss home.
The park is created on former home sites that government bought out after they repeatedly flooded. Bowden can deal with the occasional complaints about the look or utility of these spaces, but he senses they're working, particularly after they were tested by Tropical Storm Debby this summer. Debby was this neighborhood's nightmare scenario, a sustained rainfall over several hours.
"You can't really know in any one storm if any one project made a difference, but it was better than I expected it to be," Bowden says. Streets flooded, yards flooded, the parks flooded, but no one reported water entering their home. "There have been some complaints in the neighborhood that, 'This is hurting my property value,'" Bowden says.
"My answer to that is always: 'Flooding hurts your property value more.'" These parks aren't perfect, since the city is limited not only by how much money it can scrape together to buy frequently flooded properties and convert them into appealing storm detention areas but also by property owners' willingness to sell. Some are willing, some aren't.
As a result, there isn't one solution to fixing Church Creek's flooding problem. There are dozens. And as the work finishes on the first few, Bowden is bracing for more public blowback, "but I'll explain until I'm blue in the face that this is what we have to do.
" Charleston City Councilman Stephen Bowden tours a path built in a new rain garden-like park near his Shadowmoss home. The park area is created on former home sites that the government bought out after they were repeatedly flooded..
