Arcade

After listening to Porgy and Bess for years, I knew I'd have to find Catfish Row, and indeed I did.  This is the arcade between the double house on Church Street that's known as Catfish Row or sometimes Cabbage Row, which was the setting for the Gershwin's opera.

Location Information 89 - 91 Church Street, downtown Charleston

By the 1920's, much of Church and East Bays Streets had degenerated into slums, and these buildings were crowded tenements with the residents selling produce on the street.  Sammy Smalls, a crippled black fish vendor who drove a goat-drawn cart and had a propensity for settling arguments with a gun or a knife, was known to frequent "Cabbage Row".  Just down the street lived DuBose Heyward, a scion of planter aristocracy (reduced to selling insurance) and an aspiring novelist.  The "Catfish Row" of his novel, Porgy, was patterned after this neighborhood, and his title character was a romanticized version of the foul-smelling fishmonger with the long criminal record.  Heyward later collaborated on the opera Porgy and Bess, renting for George Gershwin a house on Folly Beach from which the two ventured by boat to the isolated sea island religious services for inspiration.

Excerpt taken from; The Charleston Walking Tour by Alan Hartley