Cabbage Row is the setting for Porgy and Bess

In the early twentieth century, Black families lived on the upper floors of these two buildings and used the ground-floor windows to sell vegetables to people passing by on the street. The name Cabbage Row comes from the piles of produce sold from those windows.

DuBose Heyward lived just down the street at 76 Church Street between 1919 and 1924. In March 1924, he read a short report in the News and Courier about a man named Samuel Smalls. Smalls was a disabled man born in 1889 who was a familiar sight in downtown Charleston. He moved through the streets in a cart pulled by a goat, selling peanuts and produce. People in the neighborhood called him Goat Cart Sam.

The newspaper item Heyward read was titled Busy Time for Police. It described how Smalls had been arrested on March 24, 1924, for shooting at a woman named Maggie Barnes at 4 Romney Street. The report detailed how Smalls tried to escape the police in his goat cart.

Heyward used the story of Samuel Smalls to create the character Porgy. He took the real-life escape in a goat cart and rewrote it as a heroic chase through the city streets. He also used these buildings as his architectural model, changing the name from Cabbage Row to Catfish Row and moving the setting one block east to East Bay Street.

The novel Porgy was published in 1925. Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, later adapted the book into a play. Eventually, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin collaborated with Heyward to turn the story into the opera Porgy and Bess, which was first performed in 1935. While the opera made the fictional Catfish Row famous around the world, the story began with the vegetable sellers and the man in the goat cart here on Church Street.