DI News History - May 17, 2018
TEN YEARS AGO – Daniel Island’s image
An article in the May 15, 2008 issue of The Daniel Island News featured a blog site that captured what people from around the area thought about Daniel Island. The blog site, www.city-data.com, offered a collection of alternative, and often humorous, viewpoints on Daniel Island. One entry described the island as “a beautiful place to live,” but others commented that the community had a troubling “eerie” quality. Some comments ranged from enjoying the Family Circle Cup (now called the Volvo Car Open), to “liking the island but wouldn’t consider living there.”
The island did earn a nod from the City Paper in March of 2008 as the “Best Place to Jog and Watch High School Students Beat Each Other Up,” a title that referred in part to a scuffle between Porter-Gaud and Bishop England students on the island the year before.
Another article in that same issue focused on Daniel Island’s development perception. The article’s author suggested that Daniel Island sometimes drew comparisons to director Peter Weir’s fictional New Urbanist town of Seahaven in his 1998 hit movie “The Truman Show.” The implication was that Daniel Island was sterile, boring, soulless and contrived. Smug sniping like that missed the point, according to landscape architect Steve Dudash of DesignWorks LLC. Planned communities such as Daniel Island are about community pride, he said. When Daniel Island’s master-planned community was still on the drawing board in 1993-94, his Charleston firm was picked to design the island’s award-winning landscapes and urban spaces. Dudash compared life on Daniel Island to the little upstate S.C. towns of his childhood.
“There were great small towns where you had sidewalks and trees,” he said. “You could go two miles to the soda fountain and be shaded by canopies of trees the whole way. It was a wonderful place to grow up as a kid and I think that if you design a place for a child, something good is going to happen. People will know their neighbors and become engaged with each other.”
FIVE YEARS AGO – DINA meeting on DI Master Plan
The May 16, 2013 issue of The Daniel Island News included a recap of the Daniel Island Neighborhood Association meeting that month. Tim Keane, City of Charleston director of planning, preservation and sustainability at the time, was a speaker at the session. Keane was asked to address the group to talk about the island’s master plan, created almost 20 years ago.
“Let me start by saying ‘congratulations’ for living on Daniel Island,” he told the crowd of more than 70 people at the start of his remarks. “You deserve it!” Keane, who oversaw “the whole spectrum of the construction process” for most aspects of Charleston’s built environment, was responsible for the city’s urban planning, design review, historic preservation and zoning. He called this “an exciting time” to be in Charleston and our region while praising Daniel Island for its successes as a master planned community.
Also in the paper was a collage of pictures from the Concert in the Park. The winner that year was Duck Dynasty.