Charleston City Market

The City Market is a famous Charleston landmark and a favorite of visitors. Encompassing four city blocks from Meeting to East Bay Streets, the City Market houses is known for Sweetgrass baskets, tremendous restaurants, bars, local vendors selling everything from jewelry to novelty items and is where the immensely popular carriage tours depart from. Market Hall Painstakingly restored:  this Roman Revival building soars as majestically above Charleston’s tourism trade as it once did over the beef market that occupied the block behind it. While most of the building is brick covered with rouge-tinted stucco (colored in some areas with pigmented lime wash), it also has brownstone details and bronze ornaments in the frieze depicting the skulls of rams and oxen, the use of which to indicate proximity to a meat market has precedence in Roman architecture. During the Civil War, the upper floor was used as a venue for balls to support the Confederate cause and is today leased by the Daughters of the Confederacy where a museum is housed. The legendary Palmetto Guard was honored here before going to war, and the veterans gathered here annually to remember their fallen comrades through 1917, when the last two survivors met.