Those raunchy days are long gone, but the city's turbulent history is memorialized in countless plaques that dot the streets like oversize Post-its. Apart from the Civil War, there have been fires, insurrections, race riots, and hurricanes—most recently Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which damaged almost every building in town and caused $3.7 billion in losses. Yet the core has proved indestructible.

In that respect, Charleston is almost un-American. It has little of the national addiction to change for change's sake. Real estate developers, given a loose rein on the outlying islands, may have succeeded in turning vast tracts of wetlands into golf courses and condos—thus setting the stage for hurricanes that are likely to make Hugo seem no more than a squall—but within the city itself, their depredations have been kept to a minimum.

Although the city market is swarmed by souvenir hunters, and nineteenth-century warehouses along East Bay Street, formerly home to shipping companies, now house tapas bars or schlock art galleries, it's easy to outflank the mobs. In unspoiled neighborhoods like Radcliffborough (where the model for Rhett Butler is said to have lived), Mazyck Wraggborough, Ansonborough, and Harleston Village, the residents go about their own affairs, oblivious to interlopers. For a wonder, nobody tries to sell you anything.

Under the stewardship of Mayor Joseph Riley, who's been in office since 1975, downtown has been resurrected, building by building, almost brick by brick. King Street, the main shopping drag that had become badly run-down, is bustling again, and Upper King, formerly the heart of black Charleston, is now getting the same treatment. In earlier times, it was usually bad news when a Southern town had a longtime boss, but Riley's rule, far from fostering cronyism and insularity, has been cosmopolitan and, for the most part, scandal free. It's largely his doing that Charleston has ceased to be a backwater and has reconnected to the larger world, with two major arts festivals, Spoleto USA and the African-American and Caribbean MOJA.

The mayor's critics accuse him of removing the city's soul along with the decay, and it's undeniable that much of what was once funky has been gentrified. Cabbage Row on Church Street, the inspiration for Catfish Row in Porgy and Bess, started life as a Negro tenement, before the Depression forced most blacks to leave town and look for work up north. Cabbage Row became derelict; a few more years and it would have been past saving. Instead, refurbished and immaculate, it is now lined with vacation apartments.

Purists lament the loss of authenticity, but as I stroll in warm bright sunlight by the scrubbed stone fronts of the terraced houses, the jewel-box foyer of the Dock Street Theatre, and the opulent swell of St. Philip's Church, I find an enchanted place where alleys lead to Palladian mansions, hidden gardens to panoramas. Some of the architecture is wildly overwrought; much more is exquisite. And, every few blocks, I come to a new feeding post too tempting to pass up.