2201 Dart Street
Dart Street Duplexes
In 1947, amid a wave of urban expansion, sixty-five new streets were named in Columbia. Among them was “Warehouse Street,” located directly west of where the Leevy School once stood, and where C.A. Johnson High School would be under construction the next year. Warehouse Street, as its name suggested, was originally planned to serve a warehouse district adjacent to the Southern Railway tracks. Instead, the post-World War II population boom resulted in the growth of residential housing on this street in the late 1940s. The post-war influx of returning servicemen and growing families precipitated a trend of space-efficient, multi-family homes across the city of Columbia, particularly in the form of duplexes. The homes built along Warehouse Street developed as part of this pattern, and many still stand today. They are simple, front-gabled structures with small front porticos, wooden siding and metal seam roofs, and are usually two rooms wide and two or three rooms deep. In the 1940s and 1950s, they were advertised specifically for African American tenants.
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Dart Street Duplexes, 2018. Historic Columbia collection
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Dart Street looking south toward Chesnut Street, circa 1960. Image courtesy Joseph E. Winter Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
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In 1964, a spark from a fireplace set 2205 Dart Street ablaze. Image courtesy Joseph E. Winter Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
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Damage from the fire was contained, and the duplex stands largely unaltered today. Image courtesy Joseph E. Winter Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
In 1952, the residents who lived along Warehouse Street signed a petition asking that City Council change the name of their residential street, which had, in fact, never seen the erection of a single warehouse. The citizens suggested “North Oak Street” as a natural continuation of Oak Street, which ran north-south through historic Kendalltown and ended several blocks short of C.A. Johnson High School. The City Council vetoed this name, but considered other options that incorporated the names of significant African Americans who had lived or worked in the neighborhood: Perry, for W. Augustus Perry, the former principal of Waverly School; Jaggers, for the Reverend Charles Jaggers; and Chappelle, after a former president of Allen University. In the end, residents and City Council agreed upon “Dart Street,” for William A. Dart, who was a former principal of Howard School and a graduate of Howard University in Washington D.C.