Dock Street Theatre

The Dock Street Theatre visitors enter today is not the theater that opened on this block in 1736. The first Dock Street playhouse burned in 1754. After the theater closed, Alexander Calder bought the site and neighboring buildings, turning them into the Planter’s Hotel around 1809. The hotel’s layered brickwork still shows that the present complex grew through additions rather than from one unified design.

The hotel served travelers from South Carolina’s interior, especially planters who came to Charleston during horse-racing season. Its rooms also connected it to the city’s theater world: touring performers stayed nearby, and Junius Brutus Booth, the celebrated actor and father of John Wilkes Booth, was among its guests. The National Park Service records a violent episode involving Booth and his manager at the hotel in 1838, though the building’s larger story is one of changing public use rather than a single dramatic incident.