Reclaiming Her Past

This Old House teams up with a second Charleston homeowner to revive a dilapidated but memory-fi lled Victorian-era house where her grandparents once lived

- Bridget Venatta

AS JUDITH AIDOO-SALTUS stands in the foyer of her 1890s Charleston, SC, house and surveys a beat-up screen door, the decades seem to roll backward. With its warped and gouged wood, peeling paint, and rusted hardware, the door is in rough shape, especially compared with the rest of the home, which is looking refreshed thanks to a down-to-the-studs renovation that is being documented by This Old House TV.

For Judith, 55, the weathered door is something of a time machine, sparking memories of the summers she spent in Charleston with her grandparents. Every year till she was about 12, she traveled to their home from Washington, D.C., where her Charleston-born mother and her father had settled after graduating from Howard University. Judith remembers peering through the door’s scallop-edged screen to catch the breeze and drink in the hustle and bustle of the surrounding Elliotborough neighborhood. “Back then, it was a thriving middle-class black community,” Judith recalls. “We all knew our neighbors, and my grandmother would sit on the porch and hail people as they passed by.”

Recent gentrification has changed the fabric of the neighborhood, with new construction peppered in among the period houses, and lots of upscale restaurants and bars have popped up within walking distance of the house. While she cherishes memories of the close-knit community she knew as a child, Judith also concedes, “It’s good to see the property values going up and the old houses being refurbished.”