Charleston City Market

The Charleston City Market is open every day from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (hours as of mid-2026; the official site posts changes), costs nothing to enter, and takes about half an hour to walk end to end. It has operated on this spot since 1804, which makes it one of the oldest public markets in the country, and it bills itself as Charleston's most-visited attraction.

Whether those four blocks are a highlight or a souvenir gauntlet depends on how you approach them. This guide covers what the market actually is, what is genuinely local among the stalls, and the one piece of its history most visitors get wrong.

What it is and how it's laid out

The market is a straight run of four long shed buildings stretching about 1,240 feet from Meeting Street to East Bay Street, with North and South Market streets on either side. At the head of the line, facing Meeting Street, is Market Hall, an 1841 Greek Revival building on a high arched base, designed by Charleston architect Edward B. White after the Temple of the Wingless Victory in Athens.

Behind Market Hall, the first shed is the Great Hall, enclosed and air-conditioned since a $5.5 million renovation finished in 2011. It holds around 20 small permanent shops under a skylight that runs the length of the building, and it is where you'll find the more polished goods, packaged Lowcountry foods and jewelry rather than table stalls. The remaining sheds, from Church Street down to East Bay, are open-air, with two rows of vendor tables and a wide center aisle under ceiling fans. That is the market most people picture, and where most of the roughly 300 vendors set up each morning.

Upstairs in Market Hall is the Confederate Museum, run by a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which has leased the hall's upper floor from the city since 1899. It keeps its own limited hours, Thursday through Sunday as of mid-2026, and charges a separate small admission. The market below is unaffected either way.

A short history, and the myth to drop

In 1788, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and neighboring landowners ceded this strip of marshland to the city on the condition that it be used as a public market forever. The first sheds went up starting in 1804, and vendors sold beef, fish, and vegetables from stalls that rented for a dollar a day, or two dollars if the stall came with a marble slab. When the original market house at Meeting Street burned in 1838, the city replaced it with today's Market Hall. The whole complex was named a National Historic Landmark in 1973, by which point the market had nearly died: in 1944 it was down to four vendors.

Now the correction. You will still hear the City Market called "the old slave market." It never was one. Enslaved people were never bought or sold here; this was a food market, staffed and shopped by many enslaved Charlestonians, who often did the buying and selling themselves, working the stalls as butchers and street vendors. That daily presence is likely where the nickname came from, and the shorthand stuck.

Charleston's actual slave auctions happened elsewhere: for decades in the open, near the Exchange Building, and after an 1856 city ordinance banned public sales, inside dedicated auction rooms concentrated on Chalmers, State, and Queen streets. One of those rooms survives. Ryan's Mart, built in 1859 at 6 Chalmers Street, is now the Old Slave Mart Museum, a city-run museum staffed in part by descendants of enslaved Charlestonians. It is open Monday through Saturday, 9 to 5, admission $8 as of mid-2026, and it is a ten-minute walk from the market. If the market's history is what drew you in, that walk is the honest way to finish the story.

The sweetgrass basket weavers

The market's best claim on your time is its resident weavers, more than 50 Gullah artisans who coil sweetgrass baskets at their stands, most of them from families who have done this work for generations. The technique came from West Africa with enslaved people over 300 years ago, when coiled grass "fanner" baskets were used on Lowcountry plantations to winnow rice, tossing the grain to separate it from its chaff. The Gullah Geechee communities of the sea islands, particularly around Mount Pleasant, kept the craft alive after emancipation and turned it into an art form. The baskets are made from sweetgrass, bulrush, longleaf pine needles, and palmetto, all gathered by hand.

About the prices: a small basket runs $25 to $50, and large sculptural pieces climb into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. That is not tourist markup. A sizable basket takes weeks of hand work, the materials are harvested by hand from a dwindling supply of coastal grassland, and you are buying a one-of-a-kind piece from the person who made it, in a craft that museums now collect. Watch a weaver work for five minutes and the pricing explains itself. If a basket is out of budget, small woven roses and ornaments are the affordable entry point, and the weavers are generally happy to talk about the tradition either way.

What's local, what's not

Honesty requires saying it: plenty of the market's stalls sell the same t-shirts and trinkets you could find in any tourist town. The market knows this, and runs a "Certified Authentic Handmade in Charleston" program; vendors displaying the seal make their goods locally. Beyond the basket weavers, the local layer includes benne wafer bakers, Lowcountry food goods, working artists, and photographers. A useful rule: if the person at the table made the thing, it's worth a look. If the same item is stacked twenty deep, keep walking.

The Night Market makes the sorting easy. On Friday and Saturday evenings from March through December, 6:30 to 10:30 p.m., the open-air sheds turn over to roughly 100 local artists and makers, with live music in the aisles. It is free, cooler than midday, and the strongest version of the market if your trip lines up with it.

Is it worth it?

Yes, with calibrated expectations. It is free, it is in the exact center of the tourist district, and the weavers alone justify twenty minutes. Go early (before 10 a.m.) or hit the Night Market; midday in summer, the sheds are hot and shoulder-to-shoulder. Skip it only if crowds ruin places for you, and don't arrive expecting a farmers market or food hall. This is a craft and souvenir market with a remarkable history, not a place to assemble lunch.

One more calibration: the market is a shopping stop, not a museum. If you want the history of the surrounding blocks told properly, the Old Walled City historical walking tour (4.6★, 710 reviews) covers the colonial district just south of here, and pairs well with a market visit the same day.

Getting there and what's nearby

The market sits at Meeting and Market streets, mid-peninsula, and if you are staying downtown you can almost certainly walk. Driving, aim for the city garages on Cumberland Street or Church Street, both about a block away; street meters near the sheds fill fast. From the East Bay end of the market, Rainbow Row is roughly a ten-minute walk south, an easy pairing with Waterfront Park on the way.

The blocks around the market are also Charleston's food-tour territory; several Charleston food tours route through the neighborhood, and the downtown culinary walking tour (4.9★, 120 reviews) is the standout if you want the eating handled by a guide. For everything else within walking distance, start with our things to do in Charleston guide.