The French Quarter of Charleston, South Carolina, is a section of Downtown Charleston. It is considered to be bounded by the Cooper River on the east, Broad Street on the south, Meeting Street on the west and Market Street on the north. The area began being called the French Quarter in 1973 when preservation efforts began for warehouse buildings on the Lodge Alley block. The name recognizes the high concentration of French merchants in the area's history.
It was settled as part of the original Grande Modell of Charles Towne in 1680. It is famous for its art galleries; it also has many restaurants and places of commerce as well as Charleston's Waterfront Park.
Charleston's French Quarter is home to many fine historic buildings, among them, the Pink House Tavern, built around 1712, and the Slave Mart, built by Z.B.Oakes in 1859. Also in the French Quarter are the Dock Street Theatre, arguably the first site of theatrical productions in the United States, and the French Huguenot Church, a beautiful Gothic-style church which houses the sole-surviving French Calvinist Congregation in the United States. St. Philip's Episcopal Church, the first congregation in Charleston, whose current building dates to 1835, is also in the French Quarter. St. Philip's cemetery is the final resting place of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, and U.S. Senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun, whose large tomb is empty; his bones were removed during the Civil War to protect them from capture by invading Union forces, and have never been recovered.