Waterfront Park

Industrial land on Charleston's Cooper River — wharves, terminals, gravel parking lots, and the charred pilings of a steamship terminal that burned in June 1955 — sat deteriorating until Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. began making plans for a park there soon after taking office in 1975. Land acquisition began in 1979. Construction broke ground in 1988, Hurricane Hugo struck in September 1989 and caused roughly a million dollars in damage, and the park opened in May 1990 anyway. Stuart O. Dawson of Sasaki Associates designed it. The 2007 Landmark Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation followed.