The Beauty Imperative: Theodora Park

“If you love nature, you will find beauty everywhere,” reads a quote that retired public relations executive David Rawle spotted in a café in Norway. “How true that is!” he affirms. “And it’s why it’s essential for urban environments to include green spaces that are truly beautiful, well-maintained, welcoming, and safe. With Theodora Park, we sought to raise the bar on each of those attributes.”

Opened in 2015, the pocket park on the corner of George and Anson streets, across from the Gaillard Center, is named in honor of Rawle’s mother, who loved nature and art. The small rectangular space had been a neglected, fenced-in “tot lot,” though children rarely played there. “It was dense with magnolias, with no place to sit. And at night, dark and dangerous,” says Rawle, who saw potential for the prominent corner and proposed to then-mayor Joe Riley that he and his wife, Carol, would donate $100,000 if the city and the Charleston Parks Conservancy would help bring a new park to life.

That dollar amount proved to be just the start, notes Rawle, who eventually created an endowment for the park’s ongoing care and maintenance, but the private investment for public good has been well worth it. The landscape design by Sheila Wertimer includes palmettos, sasanquas, camellias, azaleas, red maples, jasmine, saucer magnolias, and holly ferns, around a 32-foot-long fountain pool featuring handmade tiles by Maine-based ceramicist Paul Heroux. Other artful aspects include a Philip Simmons wrought-iron gate, purple café tables and chairs, and custom benches replicating those in Manhattan’s Battery Park. Every aspect of the design has been intentional, and while the Parks Conservancy oversees maintenance, the Rawles are daily stewards, picking up trash, adjusting this and that. “It’s a heck of a lot of work, but boy, does it make a difference in people’s enjoyment. A little bit of nature goes a long way,” Rawle says.

In the days following the Mother Emanuel tragedy, people would “stop there, in the middle of a hot June day, and just listen to the quiet ripple of the fountain. They found some peace, some nourishment, some grounding there,” says Rawle. “If that’s all that ever happened with Theodora Park, it would have been worth it.” 

But that’s far from all that’s happened there. The park has showcased the work of famed sweetgrass basket artist Mary Jackson and hosted a memorial photography exhibit celebrating Spoleto Festival USA’s Geoff Nuttall in 2022. During the pandemic, Rawle conceived of a holiday light display projecting uplifting words and messages across the park’s surfaces, with words like “Hope” and “Imagine” sparkling against palmetto trunks. Words that conveyed the essence of Theodora Park, “a beautiful natural setting for introspection and free, creative expression,” says Rawle. “With so much divisiveness and uncertainty in today’s world, where does one find relief—a sense of balance and perspective, a sense of interdependent harmony? In nature.”

Theodora Park

86 Anson St.
Hours: Daily, 6 a.m.-11 p.m.
www.theodorapark.com