Choose Charleston

Every now and again, I run through the local Craigslist just to catch a sense of what folks are buying, selling, or trading. What kinds of gigs are emerging, what openings for talent are on the upswing, and who is scouting out whom?

The method, I’ll grant you, is hardly scientific. Its fundamental limitation is that it only speaks of the segment of the population that chooses to use online posting to announce its hopes and dreams.

Some of it is truly scary. “Surely not in gentle Charleston,” I have whispered many a time while going clickety-click through the ads.

We could simply blame ‘bots for anything too out of character, of course, but it is also true that these are changing times and a changing place. People are moving to the South Carolina Lowcountry at an increasingly rapid rate, each bringing their own individual blend of ideas and expectations into the big old melting pot of Frogmore Stew we call home.

Even old Charleston, South of Broad, has absorbed its share of incoming new money from the North as of late.

We still have our cobblestone and the soft clop-clop of horse hooves from the carriage tours but we also have an emerging digital corridor and a medical district that is soaring skyward like something out of Jack and the Beanstalk.

Strange days may be ahead for this rapidly changing place.