For most of the last seven years, the good half of a Battery walk in South of Broad ended at White Point Garden. Head east from there, along East Battery toward Rainbow Row, and the sidewalk was solid underfoot. Head west onto Murray Boulevard instead, and you ran into orange construction fencing, a promenade torn up in phases, and a seawall that had been quietly failing since long before anyone started fixing it. That habit, built up over years of routing around a job site, no longer matches the ground.
The Low Battery Restoration Project wrapped in February 2026, seven months before this writing, with a ribbon-cutting on Murray Boulevard that closed out a rebuild the city started in 2019. What reopened is not a patched version of the old wall. It is a different structure entirely, and the difference changes which side of the loop is actually worth walking this fall.
What Got Rebuilt on Murray Boulevard
The project ran $71 million, funded mostly through the city's hospitality tax, and strengthened nearly 5,000 feet of seawall along the peninsula's western edge. The city finished the work in four phases instead of the five originally planned, and came in under budget, with engineering firm JMT and contractor Gulf Stream Construction handling the build. Mayor William Cogswell called the Battery a stand-in for the city's history and resilience at the ribbon-cutting, and Councilmember Mike Seekings, who had pushed for the project for years, was there for the milestone too.
The wall itself is taller now. Crews raised the Low Battery by roughly 1.8 feet to bring it in line with the High Battery's elevation, so the promenade that runs along Murray Boulevard no longer sits meaningfully lower than the stretch that wraps East Battery Street. The walkway is 12 feet wide, with landscaped medians, safer street crossings, upgraded sidewalks, and new ADA access that the old, century-old wall never had.
| Before the restoration | After (as of February 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Promenade width | Narrow, uneven, partially closed for years | 12 feet, continuous |
| Wall height | Noticeably lower than High Battery | Raised about 1.8 feet to match High Battery |
| Accessibility | No formal ADA access | Ramps and ADA-compliant access added |
| Street condition | Cracked pavement, ongoing construction | Landscaped medians, upgraded crossings, on-street parking |
None of that shows up if you only ever walked the East Battery side and skipped Murray Boulevard out of habit. It shows up the moment you actually turn west.
Fifty Years of Tour Season on the Other Streets
This October also happens to be the 50th year of the Preservation Society of Charleston's Fall Tours, the annual series of house, garden, and neighborhood walks that puts strangers behind the gates of South of Broad's private residences. The tours run all 31 days of October 2026, and tickets have been on sale since July 1.
One of the standing offerings is a walking tour called Exploring South of Broad, which meets at Washington Square next to City Hall at 80 Broad Street, gathering by the Henry Timrod statue near the park entrance. The route covers streets lined with 18th and 19th century homes, historic churches, and public buildings, and runs two to two and a half hours over six or more blocks. It is built around the interior of the neighborhood, the residential grid south of Broad Street rather than the seawall itself. Other Fall Tours programming over the years has clustered around streets like Legare, South Battery, Church, and Tradd, the same interior blocks that give the neighborhood its density of piazzas and gardens.
That geography matters for a fiftieth anniversary. A milestone year draws more attention than a routine one, and the routes that carry that attention run through the interior streets, not along Murray Boulevard.
Why the Newer Promenade Is the Quieter One This Month
Put those two facts together and the current walking pattern in South of Broad looks almost backwards from what longtime residents adjusted to during construction. The rebuilt Low Battery promenade is the newer, wider, more accessible stretch of the neighborhood's waterfront, and it is not the stretch that October's tour crowds are routed through. The Fall Tours' published walking route starts at Washington Square and moves through the residential interior. Murray Boulevard is a few blocks removed from that footprint.
That does not mean the promenade is finished in every sense. A local guide who walks the Battery regularly noted that some sections were still under some finishing work even after the main restoration wrapped, though the promenade itself was fully walkable. Worth knowing before you commit to it as a stroller route or an evening walk with a dog: most of it is done, some edges are still catching up.
The practical version of this for anyone living in South of Broad this month: if the goal is to avoid October's foot traffic, the seawall that used to be the obstacle is now the option. If the goal is architecture and gardens, the interior streets carrying this year's fiftieth-anniversary tours are still the draw, just with more people on them than usual.
The Project Waiting Behind It
One more piece worth knowing before assuming the Battery's construction era is fully over. In March 2026, Charleston City Council voted to move forward on a separate initiative called the Battery Extension Project, entering into a design agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is a different undertaking from the Low Battery Restoration that just finished, part of a broader peninsula-wide study tied to the Corps' disaster recovery work rather than a continuation of the Murray Boulevard rebuild. It is still in the design phase, with no construction timeline announced. For now, it changes nothing about the walk itself. It is simply the next chapter, still being drawn up rather than built.
South of Broad has spent the better part of a decade training its residents to expect construction on one side of the Battery and clear sidewalk on the other. That expectation ran the opposite direction for years, and this fall is the first one where it does not hold. The promenade that used to mean turning back now means turning west, and the fiftieth year of a fifty-year tradition is what is filling the other side of the loop instead.
If you are weighing what a home along this stretch of the peninsula actually offers day to day, not just on a listing sheet, King & Society knows these blocks well enough to walk you through it in person.
