Wrong Street

Rainbow Row is indeed a typical Charleston street; however, it is not the street identified as such in a photograph accompanying “The Charleston Inheritance” (April issue). The street pictured is St. Michael’s Alley, an interesting street in its own right. The building with a wrought-iron balcony housed the law offices of one of America’s most distinguished jurists, James Louis Petigru. A staunch Unionist in a hotbed of secession, Petigru once observed, “South Carolina is too small to be a republic, and too large to be an insane asylum.”