How the bridge was built: Arthur Ravenel reflects on his namesake 10 years later

The man for whom the Lowcountry’s landmark bridge over the Cooper River was named didn’t design, engineer or build it, but played a key role in making it a reality.

“The problem was always the money,” former state Sen. Arthur Ravenel Jr., 88, said recently from his downtown Charleston office, as the bridge’s gleaming twin diamond towers loomed outside the tall windows.

The need to replace the set of rusting steel truss bridges linking Charleston and Mount Pleasant had been generally accepted since the 1980s, but little progress was made. Ravenel recalls a highway inspection report in the mid-1990s that helped turn the tide. On a scale of 100, with 100 being a perfect, structurally sound bridge, the old Grace Bridge ranked as a 4.

“That’s when everybody gasped,” he said. “Everybody realized something had to be done.”

At the time, Ravenel’s political career appeared to be winding down, if not already at an end. The former Marine had parallel success in the real estate business and Lowcountry politics, where he was one of its first elected Democrats to switch over to the GOP. James Edwards, a Mount Pleasant dentist who became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, was an early ally.

But after serving decades off and on in both the state Legislature and in Congress, Ravenel lost a bid for governor in 1994, “and I didn’t have any idea of going back to the Senate.”

Then, one day, he had lunch with his longtime friend and political colleague, the late Mount Pleasant Mayor Harry Hallman. Hallman had figured out a way the state could finance such a costly project: create a special entity with a healthy revenue stream, bonding powers and a mandate to tackle only large projects of $100 million or more.

“He was a very innovative fellow,” Ravenel said of Hallman, who died in 2011 after an illness.

Hallman was persuasive, too. Their conversations helped persuade Ravenel, who was nearing his 70th birthday, to seek his old state Senate seat in 1996. He ran on just a single issue: “I’m going to try to find money for the bridge.”

In the following years in the Legislature, Ravenel did what few politicians do so neatly, living up to his campaign promise.

He had a lot of help, from then-Gov. David Beasley, who had beaten Ravenel in the GOP primary just a few years earlier but who remained on good terms with his former rival. And from then-state Rep. Henry Brown, who chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and who later would get elected to Ravenel’s old congressional seat. And there also was help on the federal level, from U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, who served in Washington with Ravenel and who helped get almost $100 million and a federal loan to help the state.

The key piece was the creation of the State Infrastructure Bank, Hallman’s brainchild and what Ravenel had returned to Columbia to fight for.

For a proposal of its size and scope, it cruised through the Legislature with relatively few changes, as lawmakers from other metro areas realized the bank also could pave the way for big highway projects in their backyards.

But it wasn’t easy: There was an initial uproar over all its pros and cons, and some debate about who should appoint the bank board members. One Senate vote came down to the wire, with Sen. Robert Ford responding to Ravenel’s plea by persuading Sen. Maggie Glover to support it.

“It just about gave me a heart attack three or four times,” Ravenel said at the time.

Ravenel recalled that Hallman drove Ravenel and Brown to the bill-signing ceremony in Myrtle Beach, where they were met by a security guard who ran up and informed them they could not park in the VIP section.

“Hallman said, ‘I’ve got the author of the bill, your former congressman and state senator, and I’ve also got the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,” Ravenel said. “The security guard said, ‘I don’t care about all that. I told you: It’s for VIPs only. There’s plenty of parking in the back,’ so Hallman drives around to the back and that’s where we parked.”

The bank soon committed about $325 million. Ravenel and other prominent local officials served on a selection committee to pick the team that would design and build the bridge, a relatively new approach to construction in South Carolina.

Ravenel kept tabs on the project as it took shape, and the state and contractors figured out what they could and would build. He said he remembers this as a happy time, and the bridge ultimately would include a 10-foot-wide bike and pedestrian lane, lighting that could be dimmed during sea turtle nesting season and room for an eventual light rail line.

“Everything is on the bridge that everybody wanted,” he said.

Before the bridge opened in 2005, state Sen. Ernie Passailaigue, a Democrat, introduced a bill to name it for Ravenel.

“He didn’t tell me he was going to introduce it. He just introduced it,” Ravenel said. “I really was a little embarrassed. I hadn’t anticipated that, but I thought it was very nice of Ernie.”

Some voiced concern about the move at the time. Ravenel had stirred controversy by referring to the NAACP as the “National Association of Retarded People.”

Howard “Champ” Covington, then chairman of the Infrastructure Bank Board, said that while Ravenel “is a fine, decent person,” the new bridge “is bigger than any one individual and it should reflect all the qualities of the state and not some state senator who happens to be in the Legislature at the time the structure is being built.”

At the time, Passailaigue noted, “the only opinion that matters is 171 legislators’.”

Passailaigue said recently that Ravenel deserved the honor not only for guiding the infrastructure bill but also for coordinating with the state’s congressional delegation – then a more even mix of Republicans and Democrats – to line up financial support there.

“We would still be fighting this battle if not for somebody like him. It took his unique personality to get it done. He was a bulldog,” Passailaigue said. “Most people around here had talked bridge politics for years and years, but Arthur actually made it happen.”

There have been skirmishes about renaming it since. Earlier this year, Charleston-area lawmakers turned down state Rep. Wendell Gilliard’s bill to name the bridge The Sweetgrass Skyway, though the bill made clear that the state would continue to designate the bridge span as the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge.

“My intent was never to take the name away from Arthur Ravenel,” Gilliard said.

Ravenel kept silent while lawmakers considered what to do. “People asked me what I thought,” he said. “I said listen, the Legislature owns the bill. I’m not getting involved in that one way or the other.”

Asked whether he expected people would really call it the Ravenel bridge or simply the Cooper River bridge, Ravenel said he expected an earlier nickname would have stuck more.

That nickname was suggested by someone familiar with the folksy style of Ravenel, who traces his first Charleston ancestor to 1686 and who is well known to most as Cousin Arthur.

“I thought they would call it ‘the Cuzway,’” he said.

Ravenel was re-elected in 2000 and served a second four-year term in the Senate as the bridge took shape over Charleston Harbor.

About a decade ago, Ravenel left the Legislature following a scare. One night, he fell asleep at the wheel of his pickup truck while returning home from Columbia. But he still served on the Charleston County School Board before leaving elected office. He also has made a cameo on “Southern Charm,” a reality show that features his son Thomas.

This story was originally published July 26, 2015 at 10:04 PM with the headline "How the bridge was built: Arthur Ravenel reflects on his namesake 10 years later."