This Culture South article by Katharine Walton was originally published on October 11th, 2025.
Editor’s Note: Introducing Artful Trotting, Culture South’s new travel section, which shares notes and tips from forays around the South, starting with a recent interlude in Greenville, S.C. by North Carolina-based writer Katharine Walton.
Greenville, S.C., it’s true: People are talking about you.
The gossip sounds something like this: How on earth did this upstate mill village-turned-mid-sized-city land in The New York Times’ annual “52 Places To Go”? A Southern Living pick makes sense, but now this: Travel + Leisure readers voted you a “Favorite 15” place in the United States. Accolades beget accolades.
Still, I’m skeptical.
Sure, Greenville is under an hour to Flat Rock, with its Carl Sandburg’s trails, a natural waylay for a meander through the Blue Ridge Parkway. This week, that free show unfurls with the full harvest moon, then, come mid-November, through the dark-sky nights of the Leonid Meteor showers. Fall colors turn, turn, turn, oblivious to National Park Service shutdowns.
But what else calls in Greenville? I’d make time to find out the Appalachian foothill call and response.
In September, I’d found myself in the city for weeks as my husband recovered from emergency surgery. We had indulged a hubristic idea to travel between his confining knee-replacement surgeries to hear James Taylor there, drawn to Simpsonville by a county fair-like post promising “Geese in Flight” and “Dogs that Bite!”
Staying at The Mint House Greenville, or The Mint, we were near Flour Field, home of Shoeless Joe Jackson, as well as downward steps to the mellifluent Reedy River. Between hospital visits, I walked the surrounding area, checking things out.
From the jostling platform crossing from The Mint, I’m stopped in my tracks by the white noise of water on rock. The suspension bridge waves a bit and I spy a hippie crossed legged, meditating in front of a waterfall cutting through the middle of the city center.
Children venture from the side paths around the Reedy onto what appear to be Gneissic granite. Women passing by wear their hair longer and more coiffed than in my North Carolina town. A man escorts two daughters in confirmation dresses, his hair shaven at only the base of his skull. Trans people pass by, dressed in vintage conservative. Both Bob Jones University and Furman University are nearby; Clemson is not far.
All the city’s a stage
During my visit, Gutenberg! The Musical! was set to open at The Warehouse Theatre, running through Oct. 12.
The theater is across from the coffee shop A20, on Augusta Road/ Highway 20. I’m drawn by the promise of good coffee and making-life-better books jacketed in groovy color-block covers, which are sold alongside candles in sardine cans. Inside, I spot Ulla Johnson dresses and Nili Lotan jeans, moms with strollers and solo men on laptops. It’s not my thing, exactly, or is it? I keep coming back
A light-bulbed local theater marquee beckons from the coffee shop’s windows, and I start feeling like I want to see Gutenberg! The Musical! — as absurd as that sounds.
“It’s just silly, all-fun, which is sometimes what you want,” my niece Alexandra texts from New York, having seen it performed by Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells from Book of Mormon.
In the Greenville production, the roles of Bud and Doug have become Southerners Bev and Deb. “That could work!,” Alexandra texts back. “I wouldn’t have a problem with that!”
I start to think more about the exclamation mark. Top 15! Top 52! Gutenberg! The Musical! Punctuation to gain momentum! A period with an arched brow: It’s a statement and a wink.
No exclamation marks were a rule during my studies at the University of South Carolina School of Journalism. KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid, from The Elements of Style). Editorials should be about 750 words. And be invisible. Don’t tell your own story, report it. Things change.
Going home isn’t happening this week, so I extend a dynamic-pricing-stay at The Mint and book myself with a plus-one for Gutenberg! The Musical!
My friend Christy, who was driving in two hours from Atlanta to meet me, hates musicals—fatigued by years of them with her Long Island mother-in-law. Warehouse artistic director Mike Sablone said that the show is for people who love musicals and also hate musicals, because it’s making fun of them.
The Warehouse is a black box theater with a ladder and a single elegant piano (not the three-piece band from the Broadway version at the St. James).
The Warehouse has a casual, college feel. Opened in 1974 before the new photographable suspension bridge brought the gusts of refresh to town, and the restaurant scene with the hot-shot chef diaspora sprouted around it alongside media agencies like Fuel, who designed the Warehouse posters. Greenville seems a place for creatives to launch businesses that not just get by maybe thrive.
Seated upfront in this cozy space, we are back to the Gutenberg! improv-inspiration – and forward, with the two women actors in this outstretch into the American South. As the show begins at Warehouse, a voice-over, welcome-intro mentions the pair onstage are co-producers who had approached the theater with this show. What part of this intro is part of the script?! We are at outset unsettled in our seats.
In the Bible Belt, the Gutenberg Bible might come easily to mind. It’s known as the first massive printing of the Bible, bringing the word to those who might not be able to access a monk-quilled text. The wide implications of this economic invention predated AI’s disruption. We await seeing the portrayal of the girlfriend Helvetica and the want to font her. We await the song of the displaced: Monk with Me. Baudy humor.
Behind us is a row of the sort of friends, who start belly-ache laughing at the pause before words. Hysterical laughing, these friends seated behind us. They are a live laugh track. Like an earlier-career Kate McKinnon and Maya Rudolph, actors Jillian Hall and Sheila Delgado lead in this exceptionally accomplished night—at times laugh-out-loud uncomfortable, ecstatic, entrancing.
Maybe the Anthony King and Scott Brown script was too long, but so is river fishing. And director Ashlee Wasmund worked it. Part of the appeal is in the waiting for the catch. Sit back, enjoy the unknown and the twisted emotions. The Warehouse rendition of Gutenberg! is some exotic mountain barbecue joint: trucker hats play a role for the tangy German, mustardy, sauce, with a hard -to-place southern accent. Sublime. Bitte!
When Gutenberg! came to Broadway, a New York Times theater critic panned it like few major pans, yet the show endured like its premise and antidote: Follow dreams no matter what—no matter how absurd.
Stepping out of the theater, we walked across the bridge and onto the Wes Anderson set that is the Grand Bohemian Lodge. The behemoth Tudor structure rises five stories high with a wrap-around-back porch facing the Reedy River.
It’s grand and frankly a little weird from my Chapel Hill/Durham perspective. My first thought is that Greenville didn’t get the memo about cultural appropriation. Native American’s rise tall on statued horseback. The stairwells are lined with colorful Native American portraits. I’m put-off at first, which means I’ll return.
Gustatory Greenville
As I await my husband’s release from the hospital, and after checkiing out restaurant recommendations and shops etc. online, I ask around and this is where I landed over the next two weeks. There’s an appealing ‘80s to ‘90s vibe to the menus I read, and, in general, fries are fries, not frites.
- CAMP has skewered beef popsicles with marrow dip. Grilled romaine salad. Absolutely no one I encountered recommends this choice place and my thought is that it must have changed chef-hands. The new chef is said to have worked at French Laundry. (The chef’s table at Anchorage was a destination years ago and I hear it’s also still top notch.)
- Flying Biscuit serves the worst expensive breakfast and coffee ever, but I felt good about the stack of free Post & Couriers.
- Jianna has a balcony over the midtown park square, which makes is a good spot to roost solo and watch pasta swirling and oyster eating.
- Rise Bakery on the West End of town serves Ham Buerre, ham and butter on baguettes. These are great to-go for hospital delivery, also the also cardamon breakfast rolls.
- Rainer’s Cafe serves coffee in East Fork Pottery mugs and chicken salad on croissant. Also, you get to sit in a booth.
- Passerelle is an ‘80s bistro throwback with patio umbrellas and the most delicious three-cheese cheeseburger, fries, house red.
Finally, the real RX I’m surprised to find is Between the Trees at The Grand Bohemian Lodge, on its back porch at day break: a press pot of coffee, bacon, sausage, stone ground grits, fried eggs and the white noise of the Reedy River.
Shops on Main
The bookstore here is the over-achieving M. Judson Booksellers and it’s a hive on coffee. Someone there put a lot of work into Recommended Reading Lists for the Warehouse plays (Enemy of the People, now Gutenberg!) and promises to keep it going, play by play, throughout the 25-26 season.
From the hospital bed, my husband urges, “Make sure to go see Mary Praytor. I met her while working at View Magazine, back in the day.”
When I step inside Mary Praytor Gallery, the aura overwhelms. The gallerist shows me work from a student of her brother’s at Greenville Tech. She goes to the closet and pulls out work painted by outsider artist Howard Finster with sayings such as “Speak Kind to All!”
To Greenville, once more
After being released from the hospital and returning home, we are required to head back to Greenville for followup. This time, I book a night at The Grand Bohemian Lodge, asking for a balcony view of the Reedy River. Immobile we can hang out here in the Adirondack chairs and take it in. We’ll order room service.
.
It’s not the same Greenville as in my husband’s high school years. It’s like a vacation in the mountains. “Medical tourism,” we tell ourselves.
Come November, our next post-op appointment could sync with the Open Studio tour Anna Huff at the Metro Arts Council is helping plan for November 15-18. Also, I’ll sneak back to The Grand Bohemian to revisit the local jewelry shop and art gallery with the paintings I’m recalling (Maggie Macdonald’s abstracted Left Unsolved, in acrylic, oil, chalk, pastel, graphite and ink ), Greta McCall’s chunky Early Fall and so many prism-ish works by Lu Wixon. Still, the spookier art featuring owls and hares boxing sells best, I’m told.
Recalling Mara Label’s fabulous leafy gold collars there, and the unattributed real feather headdress on floor five, I bite into a Rise Bakery pain au chocolate, driving out of town, the leaves of puff pastry falling.
Katharine Walton has long worked in magazine and book publishing. She was the editor-in-chief of Charleston Magazine for years before joining Algonquin Books as its publicity director, helping to establish the premiere southern publisher. She was the founding literary editor of Garden & Gun, for the year it was the first runner up for best launch in the US.. After helping launch so many projects as an editor, agent and promoter, she’s enjoying using her USC News-Ed Journalism degree for her work as an investigative reporter for the Edgefield Advertiser based in Edgefield, S.C.
