Charleston, Meeting Street, near its intersection with George Street. The rear of the old College of Charleston Gymnasium, c.1939 meets the new College of Charleston Arena, c.2008. Photo taken in early December, 2008. The old gym, now known as the Silcox Gymnasium, was designed by Albert Simons as one of several large projects funded by the WPA. The goal of this make-work federal project was designed to put the unemployed construction workers of the region to work and to give the city's public college its first indoor athletic facility. The gym was built to replace the recently demolished Radcliffe-King mansion, c.1799, allowing the new gym to incorporate the perimeter fence and walls of the massive urban estate. Architecturally significant interior finishes were salvaged when the Radcliffe-King Mansion was pulled down. Much of this important historic fabric was later incorporated into the interior of another WPA project also designed by Albert Simons. The interiors of the public rooms of the Dock Street Theatre were once part of the drawing rooms this great house. It is this open and egalitarian access to what anywhere else would be a closed elitist enclave that makes Charleston unique. Where else would a palace designed to show off the wealth of a private individual so seamlessly be transformed into a public high school? Charleston's high style has always been supported by its elite classes while almost limitless access has been guaranteed to everyone else. The large Adam style residence built for one of the city's wealthiest planters, Thomas Radcliffe. It joined others along a stretch of upper Meeting Street that for the years between the late 1700's and 1865 could have been called Charleston's Golden Mile. The city's most prominent families and cultural benefactors were represented within a few blocks of this house. The Radcliffe estate, for most of the first half of the 19th century, became the home of a prominent member of the bar and a leading South Carolina jurist, Judge Mitchell King. Judge King's son studied medicine in Germany where he was a university student at the time of the student riots and the failed democratic uprisings of 1848. He developed a close friendship with classmates who were leaders in the reform movement and subsequent revolts. Among his personal friends was the young Otto Von Bismarck with whom he maintained correspondence for many decades, as the political fortunes of one rose to great heights and the other fell. After the American Civil War, with the family fortunes in disarray, Dr. King moved to Asheville where he practiced his profession in the foothills of Appalachia. He leased and later sold his family's famous palatial home to the city to house its overcrowded boy’s high school. At nearly 50 years old in the 1880's, the High School was already the 3rd oldest institution of its kind in the US. With public schools on the rise throughout the country, especially in the urban South after the Civil War, the old 12 room Greek revival high school on Society Street was too small. Competition for admission to the city's only boy's public high school had taken off after the region's economic and political collapse in 1865. The economy and many of its buildings were in ruins, but its institutions were intact. It was that fact that allowed sons of the first and second generation immigrants and the city's new middle class to rapidly fill the void left by the casualties of the recently ended war. For nearly fifty years the Radcliffe-King Mansion served as a well suited home for the classical education offered by the High School of Charleston. When the city's YMCA, one of the nation's oldest, chose to expand its facilities, it logically chose a site just west of the city's growing high school, then a block and a half east of the College of Charleston. With its indoor basketball court, a move supported by the father of basketball himself, the Charleston "Y" set the pattern for joint use of public facilities in the area as its mansions became homes to large public institutions. The King family's legacy was just one of many to follow. James Gibbes home across Meeting Street from the King Mansion was given to the Carolina Art Association first to be its public art gallery and later to be sold for funds that built the Gibbes Museum we now know. The Pinckney-Middleton Mansion just east of that became the city's water works within another grand Adam style palace while its backyard became the city's Olympic sized public swimming pool. Again these public facilities were all used for organized programs designed for nearby high school and college students. It wasn't until the 1930's that this Cinergy of public uses of so many grand private homes began to give way to urban decay. Gabriel Manigault's home was demolished to become a gas station. The Gibbes house was torn down to become a parking lot. The YWCA, across from the YMCA, demolished their house to become more "

Prickly pears cacti are usually small bushy like plants lacking any sort of central trunk, however, in the Galapagos prickly pears have become towering trees with tall central, woody-looking lignized trunks, some of which that I saw personally where at least over 40 feet tall (+12 meters), although the average was more like 12-20 ft (~4-6 meters). This peculiar morphology has occurred due to an evolutionary arms race between the cacti and their predators, the giant Galapagos tortoises (Chelinoidis nigra sp.). On islands without any tortoises living in the arid regions, the cacti do not grow towering trunks, but more closely resemble prickly pear species that live in the rest of the world; however, on tortoise occupied islands, the cacti grow large and have 'bark', with their pads held high and out of reach. But the tortoises haven't been totally evaded, as they too have evolved their own modifications, with the tortoise populations that one finds in the arid regions being characterized by the 'saddle-back' morphology, which means their shells look like saddles, with the anterior region flared dorsally, which allows their incredibly long necks to extend upward and forage for the elevated prickly pear pads. In fact, many researchers have appropriately compared the Galapagos tortoises to giraffes and sauropods, who have also increased their neck lengths dramatically in order to reach food (Many hypothesize other roles for long necks in these species, most importantly, for sexual purposes. In sauropods and giraffes this view has begun to fall out of favor due to recent work, although at least in giraffes and tortoises, it is known that neck demonstrations play a role in sexual displays and combat to some degree). This particular forest of cacti was adjacent to the rocky shore line, including mangroves. To see a field of giant woody cacti next to tropical mangroves and black basaltic lava rocks is a truly alien and mesmerized sight. I suggest you see it one day.