Rainbow Row

Thirteen pastel-painted row houses running along East Bay Street, built as merchant buildings with shops below and living quarters above. After the Civil War they fell into near-slum conditions. In the 1920s, preservationist Susan Pringle Frost bought six of them; in 1931, Dorothy Haskell Porcher Legge purchased a section and painted them pink, choosing a colonial Caribbean color scheme. Other owners followed. By 1945, most had been restored. Local tradition holds the colors helped sailors find their bearings coming in from port — the more documented reason is that Legge simply wanted to uplift the block.