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"Real Charleston News"

CHARLESTON OUTDOORS

Championship golf and historic sailing take center stage along waterfront venues around Charleston this Spring. Tall Ship Charleston returns May 17-20 with some of the world's greatest sailing ships featured on tours in which visitors can board the ships, meet the crews and experience the thrill of life at sea. Held at Charleston's scenic Maritime Center, overlooking the Cooper River and Charleston harbor, the festival will also include free on-land displays of pirate camps, classic wooden boats, and maritime art, as well as food, drink and music. The watery weekend also features the start of the annual Charleston-Bermuda race, as colorful sails and spinnakers grace the harbor. For information and tall ship boarding passes, contact www.charlestonmaritimefestival.com.

Kiawah Island, 30 minutes from downtown Charleston, will host the 2007 Senior PGA Golf Championship from May 22-27. A prestigious field that includes Tom Watson, Gary Player, Hale Irwin and Greg Norman will compete on Kiawah's fabled Ocean Course. The setting along windswept sand dunes and beaches of this lovely barrier island resort will provide a "most memorable spectator experience" according to Roger Warren, president of The PGA of America and the Kiawah Island Golf Resort. For tickets and information, contact www.pga.com, or call the PGA ticketing center at 1-800-742-4653.

CHARLESTON EXPLORER

Spring is the perfect season for a visit to beautiful Cypress Gardens, just 25 minutes from downtown Charleston off U.S. Highway 52. Celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2007, the serene swamp gardens feature canopies of towering bald cypress trees under which visitors can paddle through lush wetlands or wander along azalea-filled trails. Once a rice plantation during colonial times, the historic area now boasts some of the most impressive nature and wildlife displays in the state, with an aquarium and reptile center, a butterfly house, and a lively crocodile exhibit, where live specimens in outdoor habitats represent five continents. Cypress Gardens was backdrop in a number of scenes from the movie "The Patriot", and shimmering fresh-water forest basin is still a visual wonder. Protruding from a water system that flourishes with catfish, great blue herons, egrets, crawfish, turtles and alligators are seemingly sculpted sections of wood known as cypress "knees". Overhead, pileated woodpeckers and prothonotary warblers call their cheerful sound as anhingas dry their wings on limbs rising along 150-foot cypress trunks.
For information about Cypress Gardens, contact www.cypressgardens.info.

CHARLESTON TRIVIA

Charleston's nickname for centuries has been "The Holy City", and although people can readily see the abundance of church steeples along its downtown skyline, the reason for such reverence goes back to the influence of one man. In 1670, the colony of Carolina was established by eight English noblemen known as the Lords Proprietors for their help in restoring Charles II to the British throne. Being a proprietary colony, which essentially was a private business enterprise run by the eight Lords, rather than a royal colony run by the King, Carolina would have to have its own separate rules. The great English philosopher John Locke was commissioned to write the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which stipulated religious freedom rarely found in America at that time. As a result, the new colony soon attracted Quakers, Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Congregationalists and Lutherans, whose public practice of their beliefs gave the city its historic nickname.

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CHARLESTON ARCHITECTURE - Featured home: Edmonston-Alston House

 The Edmonston-Alston House at 21 East Battery is one of Charleston's museum houses and has long been considered among the finest examples of Regency style architecture in America. Built between 1817 and 1828, the stucco-over-brick mansion features some eclectic additions in its Greek Revival third-story piazza and family coat of arms along the roof parapet. Inside, the exquisite woodwork is unusual with ball shapes instead of dentils in the entablatures. The house is operated for public display by the Historic Charleston Foundation.  Find out more about Charleston's most famous addresses...